LateNightHacking Projects 2002

Auth

2002-08-28 : I've been using the Win2K resource kit kill.exe in the deployment scripts for the Sailfish project. Well, we got a new box with WinXP and everything worked except for kill, which AV's. That sucked!

I looked to find a more recent version, but I haven't been able to find a WinXP resource kit. The other kill replacements I've found don't support "regular" expression kills, which the Sailfish project depends on. Luckily, I found the source for kill and tlist on MSDN. I'm estimating it's the NT4 resource kit version, since it doesn't support killing multiple pids or regexps at once.

So, I hacked at it a little until it did. This one doesn't AV under WinXP. It ain't the prettiest, but it seems to work.

2005-06-03 : We wanted to be able to kill a process and all its child processes, so I had to add that capability. And I added the ability for kill to dump the process list it's looking at.

Usage:

Microsoft (R) Windows (TM) KILL
Copyright (C) 1994-1996 Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved
Tweaked by Louis Thomas (2002-08-27) for Win XP compatibility
Tweaked by Louis Thomas (2005-06-03) for killing process trees.

usage: KILL [options] <<pid> | <pattern>>*

           [options]:
               /?     This help.
               /f     Force process kill.
               /s     Show process list and exit.
               /t     Kill tree of child processes as well.
               /-     Stop looking for options.

           <pid>
              This is the process id for the task
               to be killed.  Use TLIST to get a
               valid pid

           <pattern>
              The pattern can be a complete task
              name or a regular expression pattern
              to use as a match.  Kill matches the
              supplied pattern against the task names
              and the window titles.

You can get the source via anonymous CVS at