killing orphan process in Windows?

[Woland99]

Howdy - I have a Perl script that uses fairly standard Win32::OLE
calls to
read Excel spreadsheets and feed data into build process. Every now
and
then that script fails and leaves orphan Excel process. Then
subsequent
build fails and you need to manually connect to build machine and use
Task Manager to kill Excel process before restarting build.
Is there a way to safely clean after yourself if any of the Win32::OLE
calls
fails and to kill Excel process?
Or - as alternative - is there a way to kill any Excel orphans before
starting
to process spreadsheets?
Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.

JT

 

[jamesfred]

Howdy - I have a Perl script that uses fairly standard Win32::OLE
calls to
read Excel spreadsheets and feed data into build process. Every now
and
then that script fails and leaves orphan Excel process. Then
subsequent
build fails and you need to manually connect to build machine and use
Task Manager to kill Excel process before restarting build.
Is there a way to safely clean after yourself if any of the Win32::OLE
calls
fails and to kill Excel process?
Or - as alternative - is there a way to kill any Excel orphans before
starting
to process spreadsheets?
Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.

JT

If you have the pid of the Excel process, you can

eval "END { kill(9, $pid) unless \$finished }"; $@ and die $@;

where $finished is true if you know that Excel has actually
finished (otherwise you could end up killing another unrelated
process).

But Win32::OLE may support a better method.