Killing a specific Windows program from Alpha Five

[ecsaltz]

With XBasic, what would be the code to kill a particular Windows program, much as one would do with Windows Task Manager?

Thanks.

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Killing a specific Windows program from Alpha Five

Don't think there is any.

Try closing the program's window.

sys_focus_put("Taskbar_window_name")
SYS_SEND_KEYS("{%F4}")

[aschone]

Re: Killing a specific Windows program from Alpha Five

I have never done this before however this should get you started. Theory is that you will run the command Taskkill.exe with the correct arguments to kill the task you desire. You can call the command + arguments in Alpha5 using SYS_SHELL().

SYS_SHELL()

Taskkill

[G Gabriel]

Re: Killing a specific Windows program from Alpha Five

What app do you want to close (Kill)?

[CharlesParker]

Re: Killing a specific Windows program from Alpha Five

Just hit ctrl+Alt+Del repeatedly you'll close everything eventually, lol. but seriously I doubt you will find a way to do this consistently across all operating systems/ versions.
If you and I were in a development team we would be having a discussion as to how important this aspect is and either fund it or kill it.
personally from what I know about it I would kill it but that 's your call - if you get it working post it for others as I am sure someone someday will find a use for it!

[ecsaltz]

Re: Killing a specific Windows program from Alpha Five

The reason for wanting to kill (terminate) a process running under Windows 7 is that I do programming using Alpha Five v11, QODBC and QuickBooks Enterprise.
There are times when I don't want the QuickBooks client ("QBW32.exe") running on the current PC. Even if the enduser closes the client, it is possible that
"QBW32.exe" still is running as a process under Windows. Depending on how I use QODBC, that can create problems. I needed a way to kill that process.

The following will work under Windows 7, I suspect it would under other O/S variants as well. Please feel free to test and comment on your experience. Thanks for all the suggestions!

FUNCTION FN_Sys_Kill_Process AS L (cl_Process AS C )
'
' Kill (terminate) a Windows process
'
' 7-17-2014
'
' Arguments:
'
' cl_Process = the name of the known process to kill
'
' Function returns:
'
' .F. = Could not find process to kill it
' .T. = Found process, attempted to kill it
'

DIM pl_ProcessPointer AS P
DIM cl_WindowsLineCommand AS C

' Setup a "possible" pointer to the process to kill.
' The pointer will have no sub-elements if the process
' does not exist.
pl_ProcessPointer = a5_resource_info(ALLTRIM(cl_Process))

' If a sub-element is found, then kill the process
IF prop_valid(pl_ProcessPointer,"ProcessID") THEN

cl_WindowsLineCommand = "taskkill /pid " + pl_ProcessPointer.ProcessID + " /f"
sys_shell(cl_WindowsLineCommand)
FN_Sys_Kill_Process = .T.

ELSE

FN_Sys_Kill_Process = .F.

END IF
END FUNCTION