Killing Gazebo, Every Time

I do a lot of development with Gazebo. A problem that has plagued me has been the fact that gazebo doesn’t listen to the Ctrl-C command, and instead needs a SIGTERM. This is super frustrating, because I have to wait something like 15 seconds before it finally dies, and when I’m trying to develop a controller, that time is valuable.

Here’s my solution (it’s a major hack). All you do is modify the nodeprocess.py file (an internal ROS file) and reduce that 15 second wait before a SIGTERM to something a little shorter and less hair pulling.

Here’s my new /opt/ros/kinetic/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/roslaunch/nodeprocess.py:56

_TIMEOUT_SIGINT  = 1.0 #seconds (used to be 15.0)
_TIMEOUT_SIGTERM = 0.5 #seconds (used to be 2.0)

_counter = 0
def _next_counter():
    global _counter
    _counter += 1
    return _counter