Question

I need to gracefully terminate (either via .bat or .vbs) a specific app in order to safely overwrite a (read-only) file in its directory and then delete all files in one of its sub-directories.

I had something like this in mind:

@echo off
taskkill /t /im App.exe
ping -n 5 127.0.0.1 > nul
xcopy /y /r "C:\Some path\My File.ext" "C:\App path"
Del /f /q "C:\App path\App sub-directory\*.*"

Rather than waiting a fixed amount of time (5 seconds in the above example) I would like the 2 last commands to be executed only when the taskkill is complete (i.e. the app is closed after eventual prompts have been resolved by the user).

Is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

In batch you could do it like this:

@echo off

setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion

for /f "tokens=2" %%p in ('tasklist /fi "imagename eq App.exe" /fo list ^| find "PID:"') do set pid=%%p

taskkill /t /pid %pid%

:wait
ping -n 2 127.0.0.1 >nul
tasklist /fi "pid eq %pid%" /fo list | find "PID:"
if %errorlevel% equ 0 goto wait

xcopy /y /r "C:\Some path\My File.ext" "C:\App path"
del /f /q "C:\App path\App sub-directory\*.*"

endlocal

I’d prefer VBScript for this, though.

Set wmi = GetObject("winmgmts://./root/cimv2")
Set sh  = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
query = "SELECT * FROM Win32_Process WHERE Name = 'App.exe'"

For Each p In wmi.ExecQuery(query)
  ' p.Terminate would forcibly terminate the process (like "taskkill /t /f")
  sh.Run "taskkill /t /pid " & p.ProcessId, 0, False
Next

Do While wmi.ExecQuery(query).Count > 0
  WScript.Sleep 100
Loop

Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
If fso.FileExists("C:\App path\My File.ext") Then
  fso.DeleteFile "C:\App path\My File.ext", True
End If
fso.CopyFile "C:\Some path\My File.ext", "C:\App path\", True
fso.DeleteFile "C:\App path\App sub-directory\*.*", True

Instead of deleting the destination file, you could also remove the read-only flag:

Set f = fso.GetFile("C:\App path\My File.ext")
f.Attributes = f.Attributes And Not 1