How to terminate all [grand]child processes using C# on WXP (and newer MSWindows)
- by NVRAM
Question: How can I determine all processes in the child's Process Tree to kill them?
I have an application, written in C# that will:
Get a set of data from the server,
Spawn a 3rd party utility to process the data, then
Return the results to the server.
This is working fine. But since a run consumes a lot of CPU and may take as long as an hour, I want to add the ability to have my app terminate its child processes.
Some issues that make the simple solutions I've found elsewhere are:
My app's child process "A" (InstallAnywhere EXE I think) spawns the real processing app "B" (a java.exe), which in turns spawns more children "C1".."Cn" (most of which are also written in Java).
There will likely be multiple copies of my application (and hence, multiple sets of its children) running on the same machine.
The child process is not in my control so there might be some "D" processes in the future.
My application must run on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of MSWindows.
On the plus side there is no issue of data loss, a "clean" shutdown doesn't matter as long as the processes end fairly quickly.
