psutil.Popen returns the wrong exit code when it is killed with a signal

[delcypher]

Summary

On Linux when a process gets killed by a signal the exit code is negative and the abs value of the exit code is the signal number (e.g. -6 is SIGABRT).

Python's subprocess.Popen will return the correct negative exit code if the application is killed with a signal. pustil.Popen does not.

I think this is bug because psutil.Popen is supposed to have the same interface as subprocess.Popen.

Either this is a bug which should be fixed or it is intentional behaviour. If it intentional is should really be documented.

I found this stackoverflow posted about this problem from a few years back but I'm not sure if the OP ever reported this problem.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25639578/psutil-subprocess-return-code-when-process-killed

How to reproduce

I did this use psutil==5.0.1 installed with pip.

Write a python program that aborts.

abort.py

import os
os.abort()

Now in an interactive python console try running it with subprocess.Popen

>>> import subprocess
>>> x = subprocess.Popen(['python', 'abort.py'])
>>> x.wait()
-6

Try running with psutil.Popen

>>> import psutil
>>> x = psutil.Popen(['python', 'abort.py'])
>>> x.wait()
6

You can see that the exit code from subprocess.Popen is negative indicating it was killed by a signal. psutil.Popen returns a positive exit code so it looks like the process was not killed by a signal even though it was!

[giampaolo]

This was indeed a bug. Fixed in 88e96ff.

[delcypher]

@giampaolo Thanks!