How to kill a process in Java, given a specific PID

Question

How do I kill a specific process from Java code on Windows, if I have the specific PID.

Petar Minchev · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-08T12:27:07.717

20

I don't know any other solution, apart from executing a specific Windows command like Runtime.getRuntime().exec("taskkill /F /PID 827");

edited Jan 08 '11 at 12:27

answered Jan 08 '11 at 11:44

Petar Minchev

2

add /F flag so that it kills SYSTEM processes too. – Denis Tulskiy Jan 08 '11 at 12:08
4

As I remember, taskkill.exe is only available on Windows XP Professional and later (not in the Home Edition). You might consider shipping the code with something like pskill, just in case: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-en/sysinternals/bb896683.aspx – Jan 08 '11 at 12:26
@Hypnos Shipping your app with pskill is dangerous because many virus scanners detect pskill as "dangerous application" for an unknown reason. – Robert Jan 08 '11 at 13:08
add /T flag so that if the process is a 16 bit and launched into the ntvdm wow system, that too will be killed. Otherwise it might still run even though the launching script has been killed. – The Coordinator Mar 23 '15 at 08:40

Xavier Guihot · Answer 2 · 2018-09-26T22:23:09.650

With Java 9, we can use ProcessHandle:

ProcessHandle.of(11395).ifPresent(ProcessHandle::destroy);

where 11395 is the pid of the process you're interested in killing.

This:

No import necessary as ProcessHandle is part of java.lang.

To force-kill the process, one might prefer ProcessHandle::destroyForcibly to ProcessHandle::destroy.

2 Answers2