Question

In pseudocode…

processHandle = _spawnl(_P_NOWAIT, "foo.exe", ...);

/* time passes... */
WossnameKillFunction(processHandle);

Answer 1

There is no terminate counterpart to the VC++ function _spawnl(), but it does return a Win32 HANDLE that you can use:

HANDLE handle = (HANDLE)_spawnl(...);
TerminateProcess(handle, exit_code);

Note it only returns a HANDLE if you call it with one of the NOWAIT args. If not, it will return the process’s exit code.

Of course, it’s far better if you can somehow communicate to the process that it should exit gracefully. TerminateProcess will prevent any cleanup code from being called.

(And as a small side note: despite what MSDN says about spawnl() being a deprecated POSIX function, it’s actually never been in any POSIX standard! As far as I know it originates from QNX.)