Close process

[campster]

Is there any way to determine if a process is running on my PC and shut it down if it is? I know that the process appears in the Task Manager processes window whien it's running so it seems like there should be a way to index through all of the running processes until I find the one that I want.

[RobDog888]

You could loop through them all looking for a match...

Dim oProcess As Process
For Each oProcess In System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcesses()
    If oProcess.ProcessName.ToString = "YourDesiredExe" Then
        MessageBox.Show("YourDesiredExe is running!") 
    End If
Next

Or just populate an array of processes of just the ones of the desired name...

'Gets first item
Dim oProcess As Process() = Process.GetProcessesByName("msnmsgr")
MessageBox.Show(oProcess.GetUpperBound(0).ToString)

[MetalKid]

If Process.GetProcessesByName(ProcessName).GetLength(0) > 1 Then
            Process.GetProcessesByName(ProcessName)(0).Kill()
         End If

[campster]

I'm missing something. While in debug I can step through this code and see the process thatI want to close appear in the oProcess.Processname field but the if statement is not executed. I've tried matching case but it made no difference. Do I need to include something else?

[campster]

I had to get rid of the tostring???????

Dim oProcess As Process
For Each oProcess In System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcesses()
    If oProcess.ProcessName= "YourDesiredExe" Then
        MessageBox.Show("YourDesiredExe is running!") 
    End If
Next

[RobDog888]

Weird, works for me under 2003 sp-1. What version are you running? Maybe there is a null character terminator within the array element.

[campster]

2005 express

[RobDog888]

Mine shows no terminating null character or anything. Matches with the use of .ToString

[campster]

I think that you're right. Here's what is happening. I'm starting a process within my code but this process will not run if an instance already exists. The plan was to check to see if it exists and if it does, close it before I start a new instance.

Now for the strange part. When I tried your code originally, the proces was started by by code

dirSrv.StartInfo.FileName = "myProc.exe"
            dirSrv.StartInfo.WindowStyle = System.Diagnostics.ProcessWindowStyle.Minimized
            dirSrv.Start()

I treid to uose your code to shut down this process and it did not work. I shut it down manually and remove the tostring from my code. This time I manually started the process and ran my code. It worked. I assumed that the problem was the tostring until the next time that I ran the process no longer shut down. It appears that I cannot close this process if I start it from my code butI can if I manually start the process.

Does this make ANY sense?

[RobDog888]

I did this and it created a process and killed it too.

System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("Notepad.exe")
Dim oProcess2 As Process
For Each oProcess2 In System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcesses()
    If oProcess2.ProcessName.ToString = "notepad" Then
        oProcess2.Kill()
        MessageBox.Show("Process started from code is now killed")
        Exit For
    End If
Next

[campster]

I guess that it was case sensitivity. If I created the process manually the name was in all caps but when I created it in code the name was all lower case.

[RobDog888]

Yes, it is case sensitive.

[campster]

Thanks for the help. I've been out of the Vb world for over a year. It's amazing how fast the knowledge goes away. But I'm pretty good at c++ and Fortran.