Is there a way to make sure a background process spawned by my program is killed when my process ter

Posted by Davy8 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Davy8
Published on 2009-03-10T20:33:42Z Indexed on 2010/05/23 1:30 UTC
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Filed under:

c#

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clean-up

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child-process

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orphaned-process

Basically the child process runs indefinitely until killed in the background, and I want to clean it up when my program terminates for any reason, i.e. via the Taskmanager.

Currently I have a while (Process.GetProcessesByName("ParentProcess").Count() > 0) loop and exit if the parent process isn't running, but it seems pretty brittle, and if I wanted it to work under debugger in Visual Studio I'd have to add "ParentProcess.vshost" or something.

Is there any way to make sure that the child process end without requiring the child process to know about the parent process? I'd prefer a solution in managed code, but if there isn't one I can PInvoke.

Edit: Passing the PID seems like a more robust solution, but for curiosity's sake, what if the child process was not my code but some exe that I have no control over? Is there a way to safeguard against possibly creating orphaned child processes?

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