CODEWITHSUNDEEP
winapiprocess
Daniel Rikowski
Daniel Rikowski

Reputation: 72534

How to gracefully terminate a process?

I want to terminate a number of processes, but I want to give each process the chance to save its data, ask the user about saving a file and even ignore the close request.

So TerminateProcess is out of the question, because it kills the process instantly. Another way would be to use SendMessage/PostMessage to send a WM_CLOSE to the main window, unfortunately I don't know anything about the windows of the processes, I only have the process id, so FindWindow doesn't help either. Is there any other way to find the main windows of a process?

In other words: Is there any way to terminate any process gracefully just like the Windows 7 task manager did when you clicked on "End Task"? (and not "End Process")

Upvotes: 47

Views: 61437

Answers (6)

T.s. Arun
T.s. Arun

Reputation: 357

To add to Chris Becke's answer about terminating gracefully terminating console process:

This event should be handled in the console application for graceful termination.

Upvotes: 7

Sheng Jiang 蒋晟
Sheng Jiang 蒋晟

Reputation: 15281

See MSKB Q178893 How To Terminate an Application "Cleanly" in Win32. Basically send send WM_CLOSE to all windows of the target app to allow a grace shutdown, before force kill the app with TerminateProcess

Upvotes: 14

Chris Becke
Chris Becke

Reputation: 36121

EnumWindows enumerates all the top level windows in a process. GetWindowThreadProcessId gets the process and Id of each thread.

You now have enough information to gracefully close any GUI application.

You can send WM_CLOSE messages to any window you wish to close. Many windows handle WM_CLOSE to prompt the user to save documents.You can send a WM_QUIT message using PostThreadMessage to the discovered threads to cause the message loop to terminate.

User code is not allowed to call DestroyWindow from a different app or thread to the windows... if the app does not respond to WM_CLOSE or WM_QUIT requests you're back in TerminateProcess land.

This will not close console applications as the application process, and process that owns the window, are different.

Refer to T.s. Arun's answer below for the correct method for dealing with console applications.

Upvotes: 31

amilamad
amilamad

Reputation: 480

You can use taskkill /im your_program.exe to send a termination signal to the application. It will trigger a WM_CLOSE to windows message queue. You can use Either https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms633573(v=vs.85).aspx or

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/winuser/nf-winuser-getmessage

to process the message.

Please refer a similar answer Win32 API analog of sending/catching SIGTERM

Upvotes: -1

Jason
Jason

Reputation: 2371

Use the EndTask API function. It is the same function that is used by task manager.

BOOL EndTask(      
    HWND hWnd,
    BOOL fShutDown,
    BOOL fForce
);

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms633492(VS.85).aspx

Upvotes: 3

Andy E
Andy E

Reputation: 344733

I'm not too sure about the win32 apis but you could shell execute the taskkill command line function.

taskkill /?
taskkill /pid 1230
taskkill /im notepad.exe

The /f switch would force the kill but not using it just sends the termination signal so the application closes gracefully.

Upvotes: 21

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