Is there a way to make sure a background process spawned by my program is killed when my process ter

Posted by Davy8 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Davy8
Published on 2009-03-10T20:33:42Z Indexed on 2010/05/23 1:30 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 420

Filed under:

c#

|

clean-up

|

child-process

|

orphaned-process

Basically the child process runs indefinitely until killed in the background, and I want to clean it up when my program terminates for any reason, i.e. via the Taskmanager.

Currently I have a while (Process.GetProcessesByName("ParentProcess").Count() > 0) loop and exit if the parent process isn't running, but it seems pretty brittle, and if I wanted it to work under debugger in Visual Studio I'd have to add "ParentProcess.vshost" or something.

Is there any way to make sure that the child process end without requiring the child process to know about the parent process? I'd prefer a solution in managed code, but if there isn't one I can PInvoke.

Edit: Passing the PID seems like a more robust solution, but for curiosity's sake, what if the child process was not my code but some exe that I have no control over? Is there a way to safeguard against possibly creating orphaned child processes?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about clean-up

mod_rewrite for clean URL doesn't convert the URL to clean URL (but it's accessible) [on hold]

as seen on Pro Webmasters - Search for 'Pro Webmasters'
Basically what I want to do is to convert this: http://localhost/jariungu/user_caleg.php?idCaleg2014=3 into this: http://localhost/jariungu/caleg/3 I have managed to make /jariungu/caleg/3 to direct to the original URL (as in, if I open that URL, it directs me to the appropriate page). The problem… >>> More
How do I guarantee cleanup code runs in Windows C++ (SIGINT, bad alloc, and closed window)

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have a Windows C++ console program, and if I don't call ReleaseDriver() at the end of my program, some pieces of hardware enter a bad state and can't be used again without rebooting. I'd like to make sure ReleaseDriver() gets runs even if the program exits abnormally, for example if I hit Ctrl+C… >>> More
Specify additional files to clean when doing a "make clean" with autoconf

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am using autoconf. Right now I have an intermediate .cpp file that is generated. I want to have the .cpp file deleted when I do a "make clean". I tried specifying the file in a CONFIG_CLEAN_FILES variable, but that only takes effect when I do a make distlclean. Is there a variable to set to delete… >>> More
TPerlRegEx.CleanUp() Bugfix

as seen on Regular-Expressions.info - Search for 'Regular-Expressions.info'
A bug in recent versions of TPerlRegEx caused it to crash when reusing a TPerlRegEx instance with another regular expression because two pointers weren't set to nil after freeing them. >>> More
An XEvent a Day (15 of 31) – Tracking Ghost Cleanup

as seen on SQL Blog - Search for 'SQL Blog'
If you don’t know anything about Ghost Cleanup, I recommend highly that you go read Paul Randal’s blog posts Inside the Storage Engine: Ghost cleanup in depth , Ghost cleanup redux , and Turning off the ghost cleanup task for a performance gain . To my knowledge Paul’s posts are the only things… >>> More