[wpkg-users] Killing processes

[Falko Trojahn (SMI)]

Hi friends,

> rl201 wrote:
>
> (...)
>
>> This is an interesting idea - I would like to make a further suggestion
>> that it might be possible to tag packages to wait until a process has
>> finished before installing.
>>
>> Downside: WPKG installation will hang until the process finishes.
>>
>> Upside: We don't irritate users by terminating their programs and losing
>> their data.
>>
>> I have four layers of 'priority' in my packages:
>>   900 ish - OS service packs
>>   700 ish - "Big" applications (Word, Office, AutoCAD)
>>   500 ish - "Big" application service packs (Office SP3, AutoCAD SP1)
>>   300 ish - "small" applications (PDF creator, notetab)
>>
>> I would think that waiting until (for example) word has finished running
>> before attempting to patch office to SP3 would be a good thing. It might
>> prevent (say) PDF creator from being installed but that's what
>> priorities
>> are for.
>>
>> So, a tag like
>> <process action='kill'>winword.exe</process>
>> would cause all instances of winword.exe to be terminated before the
>> 'install' commands were carried out but a tag like
>> <process action='wait'>winword.exe</process>
>> would cause WPKG execution to come to a halt until all windows.exe
>> instances had terminated.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>
> Sounds good.
> Are we able to list/kill processes with JScript though?
>
> On XP we could run an external "taskkill", but on 2000?
>
> I tried to find out if JScript is capable of manipulating processes, but
> didn't find much info. Perhaps I didn't search long enough though.

I just use pskill from sysinternals for this - please have a look here
http://wpkg.org/index.php/Firefox#Firefox_with_extensions_and_default_profile
for an example.

Best regards,
Falko

-- 
Falko Trojahn                     fon +49-341-3581294
Dipl-Ingenieur Netzwerke/Support  fax +49-341-3581295
SMI Softmark Informationstechnologien GmbH