How to get shutdown hook to execute on a process launched from Eclipse

Question

I have a shutdown hook in my application (created using Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook). However if I launch the application from within Eclipse, when it

Answer 1

On Windows to gracefully stop a java application in a standard way you need to send Ctrl + C to it. This only works with console apps, but Eclipse uses javaw.exe instead of java.exe. To solve this open the launch configuration, JRE tab and select "Alternative JRE:". The "Java executable" group box appears and allows to enter the alternate executable "java".

Now we need an external program to send Ctrl-C to a process with a hidden console. I found hints here and here. Our program attaches to the console of the desired process and sends the console event.

#include 
#include 

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    if (argc == 2) {
        unsigned pid = 0;
        if (sscanf_s(argv[1], "%u", &pid) == 1) {
            FreeConsole(); // AttachConsole will fail if we don't detach from current console
            if (AttachConsole(pid)) {
                //Disable Ctrl-C handling for our program
                SetConsoleCtrlHandler(NULL, TRUE);
                GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent(CTRL_C_EVENT, 0);
                return 0;
            }
        }
    }

    return 1;
}

Test java program:

public class Shuthook {

    public static void main(final String[] args) throws Exception {
        Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook(new Thread() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                System.out.println("Shutting down...");
            }
        });

        String sPid = ManagementFactory.getRuntimeMXBean().getName();
        sPid = sPid.substring(0, sPid.indexOf('@'));

        System.out.println("pid: " + sPid);
        System.out.println("Sleeping...");
        Thread.sleep(1000000);
    }

}

Terminating it:

C:\>killsoft.exe 10520

Test program output in Eclipse:

pid: 10520
Sleeping...
Shutting down...