Terminating a process on Windows

General Usage
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1

I’m not able to kill a Julia process on Windows. Instead, its status remains as ProcessSignaled, and it never terminates. The issue doesn’t exist on MacOS and Linux, and it occurs regardless of Julia version. I didn’t experience this issue last month, and I’m beginning to suspect that this is related to a recent Windows 10 update. Still, I thought I would reach out to the community, in case I am doing something silly (besides shelling out in the first place!).

Minimal nonworking example

# This command runs silently and terminates on its own
command = "sleep(5)"
# This command prints to the REPL and must be signaled
#command =  "while true; print(\"-\"); sleep(1); end"

process = run(pipeline(`julia -e $command`, stdout), wait=false);

# Important: On Windows, this may create a process that doesn't terminate!
kill(process)
2

This thread seems be related.

I found this workaround:

begin
  # Command for drawing a spinner
  command = "
    t=Threads.@async read(stdin, Char)
    while !istaskdone(t)
      for q=['\\\\','|','/','-']
        print('\b',q)
        sleep(0.1)
      end
    end
    exit()"

  # Draw spinner as a separate process
  proc_input = Pipe();
  proc = run(pipeline(`julia -e $command`,stdin = proc_input, stdout = stdout), wait = false)

  sleep(1)
  kill(proc) # Process is signaled, but it keeps running
  sleep(2)
  write(proc_input,'c') # Process finishes when it reads from its stdin
  sleep(0.5)
  println()
end

Instead of relying on kill(), the main process writes to the stdin of the spawned process, and this is interpreted as a sort of kill signal.

In practice, the main drawback is that I haven’t found any way for the spawned process to receive signals both from the user and from the main process.