Find and kill a specific Java process from another Java App

Question

I have several java processes running on a windows machine. I have a Java process which is supposed to monitor the other processes and periodically kill or restart new ones.

If I have a java process running com.foo.Main1 and one running com.foo.Main2 - how can my monitoring process find and kill just the Main2 process?

Update: I have some code that can execute a command line tasklist.exe and parse it, but no matter what I do, I only see the java.exe process, not which class is executing

Update 2: I do not have the ability to install non-java programs.

Answer 1

It's probably going to be a lot simpler using OS-specific tools and using Runtime.exec() to run them, but I'll try and give a platform independent answer:

---

It might be possible to do this platform independently using the Attach API. This comes with the JDK, so to use it just include tools.jar from your JDK on your program's classpath.

To get a list of virtual machines on the system, use VirtualMachine.list(). You can get/parse arguments from the virtual machine descriptor objects that are returned from this.

The attach API also allows you to load agents into already-running Java processes. Since you want to kill a Java process, you can write a Java agent that simply runs System.exit() (or if you really want it dead use Runtime.halt() instead) when the agent loads.

Once you identify the one you want to kill, attach to it and load the killer agent (the agent has to be built as a JAR file, accessible to the Java process it needs to be loaded into). Shortly after the agent is attached that process should die.

These links might help also:

An Oracle blog on the attach API

Package documentation for java.lang.instrument (has detailed instructions on how to build an agent JAR)

Answer 2

This is specific to Windows. I was facing the same issue where I have to kill the specific java program using taskkill. When I run the java program, tasklist was showing the same program with Image name set as java.exe. But killing it using taskkill /F java.exe will stop all other java applications other than intended one which is not required.

So I run the same java program using:

start "MyProgramName" java java-program..

Here start command will open a new window and run the java program with window's title set to MyProgramName.

Now to kil this java-program use the following taskkill command:

taskkill /fi "MyProgramName"

Your Java program will be killed only. Rest will be unaffected.