How can I close process by normal operation using command line? - windows

I had some processs are running in remote server. Then, I would like to close process and replace newer.
Now, I have a problem how to close process automatically.
I know we can use command to kill process, but it's force. like taskkill, ....
I would to close it in normal flow, then if the process have confirm windows before close what can I do?

There are a lot of options to end/kill processes. Probably, the easiest ones are:
Using powershell (with or without force parameter)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/stop-process?view=powershell-6
taskkill (also with or without force parameter)
Using something like Autoit (ProcessClose() )
Running something on a remote machine : use PsExec

Related

Supporting two shells in windows

I'd like to write my own (very simple) explorer.exe alternative that I could actively switch between without having to restart my computer.
Is it possible to run two shells simultaneosly (or to write a program that temporarily disables the current shell)?
If not, is it possible to stop explorer without it restarting itself, and have my shell start itself instead?
Edit
More info: I'd like to write a simple productivity tool for myself. I want to set up a very simple task manager that prevents me from starting/opening/using anything but a whitelisted set of applications I list ahead of time. Locking me into that set of apps for whatever time period I've set. If there's another (better) way to prevent people from shutting down my app, switching from my app (with alt-tab, etc) I'm all ears.
Note: I'm fine with the app/shell/whatever being escapable by restarting my computer. I just want to make it massively inconvenient to switch to being distracted, and I wanted to learn a bit more about the Windows API.
See this question for details about writing a shell.
No, there can only be one real shell process (SetShellWindowEx only works when there is no other shell process) WH_SHELL can be used by other processes and it might be enough for your needs (Maybe in combination with IShellExecuteHook)
When explorer.exe is started and it detects a different shell it will not display the taskbar, just a file browser window. Explorer also looks at the shell value in the registry IIRC. You might also want to look into the shift to exit trick.

Remotely Executing an Independent .exe on an Apache Server [CGI]

I have an executable program I've created which is a server. I would like to be able to start and stop instances of this program on a Windows Server 2008 machine via the website the same machine hosts.
The functionality I'm hoping to achieve is: from anywhere I can access my website to start and stop instances of the server code instead of constantly Remote Desktop-ing into it just to start/stop it.
I've tried using Perl, but when I run the code it looks like it prints out some of the information the program does (so it's working) but then seems to stop. Whereas I would like it to start an instance of the program as its own process.
Perl:
#!C:/Perl64/bin/perl.exe
print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
exec('C:\file.exe');
I'm not sure what language I should be using or if there are completely other, better ways of achieving my goal. Thanks!
exec is the wrong choice, and so are threads. Simply start the process in the background. You did not say how you would normally stop the server. If it has its own command for stopping, the same as for starting applies; else kill the process.

How to restart program automatically if it crashes in Windows?

How can I start my program automatically if it crashes on windows 2003 server? Sometimes my program just crashes, is there a way in windows or settings that I can set?
There are several ways to create a process supervisor/guardian process on Windows.
First, is to leverage windows command line capabilities. Create a bat file:
#echo off
:start
start /w "your app to watch.exe"
goto start
start /w will wait for the process to exit. When the process crashes and exits, the bat script will relaunch it.
Another option is to use free supervisor tool https://github.com/chebum/Supervisor. It allows to restart the crashed app, plus it allows to monitor two or more apps at once and it will automatically close these apps when supervisor's window is closed.
The usual approach is to run what is known as a guardian process. This is a separate process, often a service, that monitors the state of the main process. When the guardian detects that the main service has died, it re-spawns it.
To the very best of my knowledge, there is not built in Windows functionality to do this for you.
Notice: running self-looping bat files can be useful, but unless you know what you're doing, they can wreak all kinds of havoc. This goes especially if you run them on startup. You have been warned.
Anyway. I just remembered something from my 286 days, when I played around a lot with BAT files. If you write the file
yourprogram.exe
some other event
the BAT file will run yourprogram, and then pause and wait around in the background until the program exits. After that it will run "some other event". This used to be kind of annoying if you wanted to run multiple things at once, but here it's actually useful. Using this, it's possible to make it run a loop that restarts the program (and reruns the bat file) as soon as it exits. Combine this with https://superuser.com/questions/62525/run-a-completly-hidden-batch-file, and you'll never even see it happening.
The final BAT file ("restart.bat" in this example) will look something like:
c:\[location]\yourprogram.exe
wscript "C:\[location]\invisible.vbs" "C:\[location]\restart.bat"
That's about it. Start the program (on startup via task or even just startup folder) with line 2, and this ought to solve your problem :)
Oh, if you want to stop the loop, just rename the bat file or put "// " in front of the two lines, save it, and exit the program.
If the program you are running requires admin rights, the solution I found was using psexec (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx) to run both the program and the bat with elevated privileges. In that case the BAT will look like:
c:\[location]\psexec -h c:\[location]\yourprogram.exe
c:\[location]\psexec -h wscript "C:\[location]\invisible.vbs" "C:\[location]\restart.bat"
Then you run the bat as administrator, or run the second line (without the psexec part) from task scheduler with elevated privileges. BEWARE: running it as a normal user and clicking "no" on the UAC prompt gave me a BSOD, probably because it looped "can't run program because of lacking privileges" a couple of billion times or something :)
You can use RegisterApplicationRestart.
"If you register for restart and the application encounters an
unhandled exception or is not responsive, the user is offered the
opportunity to restart the application; the application is not
automatically restarted without the user's consent. "
For automatic restart without user intervention, there is also RestartOnCrash. Works with all Windows versions.
I was looking for something similar. There are two options to handle this - either you can write a small script by yourself or use something that is already existing.
After some googling I came across this nice list. The blogger has compiled about 8 tools to automatically restart a crashed or closed application.
Unfortunately there are no settings in Windows to automatically restart a regular program when it crashes.
Do you need to actively interact with your application's GUI? Some of the Service Wrappers (designed to run any application as a Windows Service) will monitor your application and restart it when it fails, but be sure investigate Session 0 Isolation to ensure that it won't get in the way.
You may use some special app like BDV SystemEvents or any other. It allows you to specify application which will be started if some another application is closed. Specify the same application as a Condition and as an Action and you will get expected results.

What's the cleanest way to programmatically kill and restart explorer.exe?

Greetings all,
I'm working on a Windows program whose installation necessitates restarting explorer.exe. I know "Reboot your computer to complete the installation" is the standard method here, but I'd like my installer to give users the option of just restarting Explorer so they can start using my program immediately. What's the best way to do that? Of course I could just find and kill the process, but that seems rather icky. Is there some trick to, say, make Explorer think the user is logging off and close cleanly?
Thanks!
Is this an MSI install?
Have you considered using the Restart Manager?
Restart Manager will detect which processes are holding files/handles open and need to be restarted, and allow you to automatically stop/start those processes without a restart.
I could try to call ExitProcess or TerminateProcess to stop explorer.exe.
I don't know if you can implement this, but I downloaded PsTools from:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649
Then I wrote the following batch file which kills and then executes the explorer.exe process:
pskill explorer.exe
psexec -d explorer.exe
exit
You can also try getting in touch with the author of PSTools
Mark Russinovich on the TechNet site.
You could send it the WM_ENDSESSION message.
That might trick it into thinking the computer is shutting down. Then it will hopefully free all resources, close all open explorer windows, etc.
Then when it is closed, you can restart the process.
I use powershell in my post build events like this:
get-process explorer | kill
It generally auto restarts fine

How to implement a kill switch in a native windows program

We've got issues with our program potentially hanging in certain situations, is there a way to search and destroy your own program with windows calls without using task manager. It probably wouldn't make sense to include this in the program itself, but as a bundled thing no one would see.
What's the best way to go about doing this, how deep do I need to dig to stop my program and how shallow should I keep to make sure I don't crash the OS?
You could create a .bat file and put a Taskkill command in it to forcefully terminate your application. The command would look something like this:
taskkill /f /im notepad.exe
Although you should probably fix the situation in which it hangs, one way you could have the program kill itself is to spawn a new thread when you launch the app, and have that thread poll the application and kill it if necessary.
Killing a thread in windows.
One option would be to write a Windows Service that serves as a Watchdog. You could find your program by it's .exename and then you need some way to determine if it hangs (for example some simple Inter-Process-Communication or even a Client/Server thing) and restart it if necessary.
That is hardly "no one would see" though.
You can terminate a process using TerminateProcess. You'll need to determine the target process id using EnumProcesses and then call OpenProcess to obtain a handle to the process in order to terminate it.
You can enumerate running processes using the EnumProcesses() function. This will let you search for the process name, and get the PID. With the PID, you can open a HANDLE to the process which you need in order to call TerminateProcess() to kill the hung process.
There's an example of how to use EnumProcesses on MSDN.
Some pseudo-code might look something like:
EnumProcesses(pidArray, sizeofArray, &bytesReturned);
for(int i=0; i < bytesReturned/sizeof(DWORD); i++) {
if(getProcessName(pidArray[i]) == "ourProcess"){
HANDLE hProc = OpenProcess(PROCESS_TERMINATE, FALSE, pidArray[i]);
TerminateProcess(hProc, 0);
}
}
What about implementing something from the pstools of sysinternals ?

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