Return process id

Question

I have this issue that I want to resolve. Lets think we have this situation. We have one instance of notepad.exe running. I run another notepad.exe. Now I want to kill the latter. How can I do it?

If I was able to know the pid of last notepad.exe then I could kill it. But how to get the PID of last opened program?

Another way is to give every application a unique image name. From what I learned it seems impossible becouse image names are hard coded into the binary file.

So any ideas?

P.S. As you already noticed this is all in windows.

Answer 1

If these are someone else's processes (i.e. you didn't start them yourself), then Windows keeps track of when the process was started (or its "creation time"), so I expect you could just find whichever process started last using that information.

Answer 2

Well, how are you launching the process? For example, if you are launching it from C#, the static Process.Start method returns a Process instance, which has an Id, and a Kill() method. The mechanism will differ between architectures/languages...

And if you aren't doing it through code, it may be off-topic ;-p