[bash] How to send control+c from a bash script?

ctrl+c and kill -INT <pid> are not exactly the same, to emulate ctrl+c we need to first understand the difference.

kill -INT <pid> will send the INT signal to a given process (found with its pid).

ctrl+c is mapped to the intr special character which when received by the terminal should send INT to the foreground process group of that terminal. You can emulate that by targetting the group of your given <pid>. It can be done by prepending a - before the signal in the kill command. Hence the command you want is:

kill -INT -<pid>

You can test it pretty easily with a script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

fork {
    trap(:INT) {
        puts 'signal received in child!'
        exit
    }
    sleep 1_000
}

puts "run `kill -INT -#{Process.pid}` in any other terminal window."
Process.wait

Sources: