self killing shell script

Question

I'm trying a simple test to kill a script from within its self. It doesn't seem to be working.

function testKill
{
  PID=$$
  kill $PID
  echo  hello!
}

When I run this function,

[....]$ testKill
hello!

It clearly doesn't kill the process. How do I make the process terminate before sending the echo command?

When I move this all into an external script, it terminates correctly if I call the script directly from the command line. However, if I make a function inside my .bash_profile and call the script from within that function, the script isn't killed and it prints instead. How do I integrate it into my .bash_profile?

This is a minimal working example to use in a more complicated script.

Answer 1

You haven't written a script in your example; it's a function. You're therefore applying the kill to your interactive shell session. Interactive shells ignore most signals, including the SIGTERM that you're sending.

Put the function and its call in a script and run that. It's far more likely to do what you expect.

Answer 2

try following, if you want to use it as function directly in bash, respectively sourced from console.

function testKill
{
  kill $PPID
  echo  "no hello :-/"
}