Sending a specific signal to a process started with Systems.Diagnostic.Process

Question

_{Sunday, June 22, 2014 10:33 PM}

Part way through writing a service that starts a process in a separate thread, the process doesn't respond to .Close(), it requires a SIGTERM (15) to perform its shutdown (its a windows binary with unix heritage). Currently I just call .Kill() but this doesn't allow the binary to perform its own clean shutdown. I understand that Windows doesn't use signals, so how do you send a Ctrl-C to a process?

Thanks!

All replies (3)

_{Monday, June 23, 2014 2:39 AM ✅Answered}

This question does not concern C#. GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent is the official Windows API to send a control+C/control+break event to a command line process in the Windows SDK. Problem is that 1 it fails when you don't own a console and 2 it kills the whole process group sharing the console. By default a child process inherit the parent's console, so if you send control+c to a child, the parent process could be killed too, possibly with other child processes. 

Since you gotta to create a console to call GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent, and you can only have one console per process, better do it in a child console process to isolate the effect on your service process (multiple services could be running in the same process). 

Note a console process may not honor a termination signal. You still need to kill the process as the last resort.  

If you need help in calling these Windows APIs in C#, you can look up in www.pinvoke.net, or ask in the CLR forum.

Visual C++ MVP

_{Sunday, June 22, 2014 11:02 PM}

You call GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent with CTRL_C_EVENT, but then you need to write another console process so you can invoke it in the same console group with your target process.

Visual C++ MVP

_{Monday, June 23, 2014 1:15 AM}

Hi Sheng,

Would you mind elaborating a bit as I am extremely new to C# and not very clear how to accomplish this.

Thanks!