ProcessKit 1.1.1

ProcessKit

Cross-platform child process lifetime management for .NET.

ProcessKit ensures that child processes are terminated when the parent exits — whether gracefully or via crash.

On Windows this is backed by kernel Job Objects; on Unix systems (Linux, macOS, FreeBSD) it uses POSIX process groups.

Requirements

• .NET 10.0 or later
• Windows 8+ / Linux / macOS / FreeBSD
• AOT-compatible

Installation

Available on NuGet.org.

dotnet add package ProcessKit

Verifying the package

Each GitHub Release ships a SHA256SUMS file alongside the .nupkg / .snupkg. Download all three into the same directory, then:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

Expected:

ProcessKit.<version>.nupkg: OK
ProcessKit.<version>.snupkg: OK

The package on NuGet.org carries a repository signature from nuget.org, which attributes it to the ProcessKit account. You can inspect it with dotnet nuget verify ProcessKit.<version>.nupkg --all.

Usage

using System.Diagnostics;
using ProcessKit;

// Children are terminated when the group is disposed —
// even if the parent process crashes.
using var group = new ProcessGroup();

var psi = new ProcessStartInfo("myworker", ["--arg"]) { UseShellExecute = false };
var worker = group.Start(psi);

// Kill on cancellation
using var cts = new CancellationTokenSource(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30));
var transient = group.Start(psi, cts.Token);

// Add an externally-started process to the group
var external = Process.Start(psi);
group.Add(external!);

// Runtime statistics (CPU time, peak memory, active count)
var stats = group.GetStats();
Console.WriteLine($"active={stats.ActiveProcessCount} cpu={stats.TotalCpuTime} peak={stats.PeakMemoryBytes}");

// Async dispose — non-blocking on Unix where SIGTERM/wait is involved
await using var asyncGroup = new ProcessGroup();
// ...

Running tests on Linux from Windows

The Unix code path (UnixProcessGroup, Libc) is exercised in CI on ubuntu-latest, but you can also run the suite locally against a Linux container — useful when changing native interop or shutdown semantics.

Requirements:

• Rancher Desktop (or Docker Desktop) with the dockerd / moby engine enabled so docker is on PATH
• PowerShell 7+

pwsh ./scripts/test-linux.ps1

The script mounts the repo into mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:10.0 and runs dotnet build + dotnet test. The host's bin/ and obj/ folders are shadowed inside the container with anonymous volumes, so the Linux build neither sees the Windows IDE artifacts nor writes back into the host tree. A named volume (processkit-nuget) caches NuGet packages between runs.

Useful switches:

pwsh ./scripts/test-linux.ps1 -Filter "FullyQualifiedName~TerminateAll"
pwsh ./scripts/test-linux.ps1 -Configuration Debug -Rebuild

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for the version history.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.