How can I kill a program that might not exist from Perl on Win32?

Question

I'm looking for a way to make Perl kill all firefox.exe processes on Win32, and not give an error if no process exists. I'm currently using:

system('taskkill /F /IM firefox.exe');

which throws up a big "ERROR: No such process found", when firefox wasn't present.

Answer 1

`taskkill /F /IM firefox.exe 2>&1`

Answer 2

If you want to suppress all output including errors, try this:

system('taskkill /F /IM firefox.exe >nul 2>&1');

You can see more information about command redirection and pipes here:

http://ss64.com/nt/syntax-redirection.html

Answer 3

without calling taskkill, you can use Perl modules, eg Win32::Process::List, win32::Process::Kill

See also perldoc -f kill