Killing a process using Java

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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.

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