Does anyone know how to gracefully stop a Windows process remotely on Windows XP Professional machines (i.e. there the remote machines are running Windows XP Professional)?
The pskill utility seems to only do forceful terminations, and the taskkill utility explicitly mentions in its usage message that "Termination of remote processes will always be done forcefully".
One of possible ways to do it is to send WM_CLOSE message to the application's main window: works the same as when you press the '[X]' button.
The pre-installed taskkill /IM notepad.exe command will do the thing.
How about using the psexec command from SysInternals to initiate taskkill locally on the workstations? Since taskkill is technically executed locally, it should close the process gracefully.
The right tool seems to be PsService from Sysinternals. With PsService
you
can Start/Stop/Query/Pause/etc. a service on a remote computer. Check it out...
Best regards....
