Killing a process using Java

Question

I would like to know how to \"kill\" a process that has started up. I am aware of the Process API, but I am not sure, If I can use that to \"kill\" an already running proces

Answer 1

It might be a java interpreter defect, but java on HPUX does not do a kill -9, but only a kill -TERM.

I did a small test testDestroy.java:

ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder(args);
Process process = pb.start();
Thread.sleep(1000);
process.destroy();
process.waitFor();

And the invocation:

$ tusc -f -p -s signal,kill -e /opt/java1.5/bin/java testDestroy sh -c 'trap "echo TERM" TERM; sleep 10'

dies after 10s (not killed after 1s as expected) and shows:

...
[19999]   Received signal 15, SIGTERM, in waitpid(), [caught], no siginfo
[19998] kill(19999, SIGTERM) ............................................................................. = 0
...

Doing the same on windows seems to kill the process fine even if signal is handled (but that might be due to windows not using signals to destroy).

Actually i found Java - Process.destroy() source code for Linux related thread and openjava implementation seems to use -TERM as well, which seems very wrong.