(Updated) I think I understand what you are looking for now:
You can accomplish this by spawning a new terminal to run your script:
gnome-terminal -x /path_to_dir_of_your_script/your_script_name
(or use xterm -e
or konsole -e
instead of gnome-terminal -x
, depending on what system you are on)
So now whenever your script ends / exits (I assume you have exit 0
or exit 1
in certain parts of the script), the newly spawned terminal will also exit since the script is finished - this will in turn also kill any applications spawned under that new terminal.
For example, I just tested the above command with this script:
#!/bin/bash
gedit &
pid=$!
echo "$pid"
sleep 5
exit 0
As you can see, there are no explicit calls to kill the new gedit
process, but the application (gedit) closes as soon as the script exits anyway.
(Previous answer: alternatively, if you were simply asking about how to kill a process) Here's a short example of how you can accomplish that with kill
.
#!/bin/bash
gedit &
pid=$!
echo "$pid"
sleep 5
kill -s SIGKILL $pid
Unless I misunderstood your question, you can get the PID of the spawned process right away instead of waiting until it finishes.