How to end a process in c++?

Question

Okay, so I want to write a c++ program that can end a specific process currently running. I have searched the internet and none of the solutions i have come across make sense to me. is there a simple way to end a process?

Do you want a portable solution? If not, what system? – R. Martinho Fernandes Jun 19 '11 at 20:28 — R. Martinho Fernandes, Jun 19 '11 at 20:28
Is this a process you have created yourself? – Chris Cooper Jun 19 '11 at 20:29 — Chris Cooper, Jun 19 '11 at 20:29

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 19 '11 at 20:30

5

On POSIX you call kill(3) to send SIGTERM to the process. On Windows you call TerminateProcess().

answered Jun 19 '11 at 20:30

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 19 '11 at 20:42

Assuming that you're on a *nix platform and that you have the process ID (i.e. you spawned the process yourself used some other method to infer its pid), using kill(2) should work:

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <signal.h>

void main() {
    /* ... */
    pid_t pid = ???;
    kill(pid, SIGTERM);
}

It will only work under certain conditions, though:

For a process to have permission to send a signal it must either be privileged (under Linux: have the CAP_KILL capability), or the real or effective user ID of the sending process must equal the real or saved set-user-ID of the target process. In the case of SIGCONT it suffices when the sending and receiving processes belong to the same session.

How to end a process in c++?

2 Answers2