The buggy code was introduced nearly 5 years ago at the
commit 08fd4b69e8. The
desired behavior is that SIGKILL will be sent to the
child if it does not exit within 2 seconds after it
receives SIGTERM. However, SIGALRM is masked while
waiting for the child so it cannot wake the program
up after 2 seconds to send SIGKILL.
An example shows the buggy behavior, which exists in
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (with login 1:4.5-1ubuntu2).
```bash
user1@localhost:~$ su user2 -c '
_term() {
echo SIGTERM received
}
trap _term TERM
while true; do
sleep 1
echo still alive
done'
Password:
still alive
Session terminated, terminating shell...Terminated
SIGTERM received
still alive
still alive
still alive
still alive
```
(SIGTERM is sent in another user1's terminal by
executing `killall su`.)
Here is the desired behavior, which shows what the
commit fixes.
```bash
user1@localhost:~$ su user2 -c '
_term() {
echo SIGTERM received
}
trap _term TERM
while true; do
sleep 1
echo still alive
done'
Password:
still alive
Session terminated, terminating shell...Terminated
SIGTERM received
still alive
still alive
...killed.
user1@localhost:~$ echo $?
255
```
5b4082d007