Killing a process using Java

Question

I would like to know how to  kill  a process that has started up  I am aware of the Process API  but I am not sure  If I can use that to  kill  an already running process  such as firefox exe etc  If the Process API can be used  can you please point me into the correct direction  If not  what are the other available options  Thanks

User · Answer

Try it   String command    killall  lt your proccess gt    Process p   Runtime getRuntime   exec command   p destroy      if the process is still alive  add   p destroyForcibly

User · Answer

With Java 9  we can use ProcessHandle which makes it easier to identify and control native processes   ProcessHandle    allProcesses      filter p - gt  p info   commandLine   map c - gt  c contains  firefox    orElse false      findFirst      ifPresent ProcessHandle  destroy    where  firefox  is the process to kill   This    First lists all processes running on the system as a Stream lt ProcessHandle gt  Lazily filters this stream to only keep processes whose launched command line contains  firefox   Both commandLine or command can be used depending on how we want to retrieve the process  Finds the first filtered process meeting the filtering condition  And if at least one process  command line contained  firefox   then kills it using destroy    No import necessary as ProcessHandle is part of java lang

User · Answer

AFAIU java lang Process is the process created by java itself  like Runtime exec  firefox     You can use system-dependant commands like    Runtime rt   Runtime getRuntime      if  System getProperty  os name   toLowerCase   indexOf  windows    gt  -1        rt exec  taskkill              else      rt exec  kill -9

User · Answer

It might be a java interpreter defect  but java on HPUX does not do a kill -9  but only a kill -TERM   I did a small test testDestroy java    ProcessBuilder pb   new ProcessBuilder args   Process process   pb start    Thread sleep 1000   process destroy    process waitFor      And the invocation     tusc -f -p -s signal kill -e  opt java1 5 bin java testDestroy sh -c  trap  echo TERM  TERM  sleep 10    dies after 10s  not killed after 1s as expected  and shows        19999    Received signal 15  SIGTERM  in waitpid     caught   no siginfo  19998  kill 19999  SIGTERM                                                                                  0       Doing the same on windows seems to kill the process fine even if signal is handled  but that might be due to windows not using signals to destroy    Actually i found Java - Process destroy   source code for Linux related thread and openjava implementation seems to use -TERM as well  which seems very wrong

User · Answer

If you start the process from with in your Java application  ex  by calling Runtime exec   or ProcessBuilder start    then you have a valid Process reference to it  and you can invoke the destroy   method in Process class to kill that particular process    But be aware that if the process that you invoke creates new sub-processes  those may not be terminated  see http   bugs sun com bugdatabase view bug do bug id 4770092    On the other hand  if you want to kill external processes  which you did not spawn from your Java app   then one thing you can do is to call O S utilities which allow you to do that  For example  you can try a Runtime exec   on kill command under Unix   Linux and check for return values to ensure that the application was killed or not  0 means success  -1 means error   But that of course will make your application platform dependent

User · Answer

Accidentally i stumbled upon another way to do a force kill on Unix  for those who use Weblogic   This is cheaper and more elegant than running  bin kill -9 via Runtime exec     import weblogic nodemanager util Platform  import weblogic nodemanager util ProcessControl      ProcessControl pctl   Platform getProcessControl    pctl killProcess pid     And if you struggle to get the pid  you can use reflection on java lang UNIXProcess  e g    Process proc   Runtime getRuntime   exec cmdarray  envp   if  proc instanceof UNIXProcess        Field f   proc getClass   getDeclaredField  pid        f setAccessible true       int pid   f get proc

User · Answer

On Windows  you could use this command    taskkill  F  IM  lt processname gt  exe    To kill it forcefully  you may use   Runtime getRuntime   exec  taskkill  F  IM  lt processname gt  exe

User · Answer

You can kill a  SIGTERM  a windows process that was started from Java by calling the destroy method on the Process object  You can also kill any child Processes  since Java 9     The following code starts a batch file  waits for ten seconds then kills all sub-processes and finally kills the batch process itself   ProcessBuilder pb   new ProcessBuilder  cmd  c my script bat     Process p   pb start    p waitFor 10  TimeUnit SECONDS    p descendants   forEach ph - gt        ph destroy         p destroy

[java] Killing a process using Java

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