Anakin

Questions & Answers

What is Anakin?

Anakin is a Linux tool designed to run another command and kill all orphan child processes generated by it. It ensures that when a parent process exits, its descendants do not become reparented to the init process and continue running indefinitely.

Who should use Anakin?

Anakin is particularly useful for developers, system administrators, and CI/CD engineers managing environments where processes might be terminated abruptly, such as in GitLab CI jobs that time out, leaving behind orphaned child processes.

How does Anakin prevent orphaned processes compared to default Linux behavior?

By default, when a parent process is killed on Linux, its children are reparented to the init process. Anakin utilizes Linux's PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER feature to become the 'child subreaper,' causing orphaned descendants to be reparented to Anakin itself, which then periodically terminates them.

When is it appropriate to use Anakin?

Use Anakin when running commands or scripts in environments where process cleanup is critical, and there's a risk of child processes becoming detached and continuing to consume resources after their parent is terminated, such as in automated testing or build pipelines.

How do I install and use Anakin?

Anakin can be installed via pip using `python3 -m pip install anakin2` or with Cargo using `cargo install anakin`. To use it, simply prefix your command with `anakin`, for example: `anakin my_program --some --args`.