How can I gracefully stop a process created with CreateProcessW and option CREATE_NEW

Somewhere in my application, I am creating a process like this:

STARTUPINFO startupInfo;
ZeroMemory(&startupInfo, sizeof(startupInfo));
startupInfo.cb = sizeof(STARTUPINFO);

PROCESS_INFORMATION processInfo;
ZeroMemory(&processInfo, sizeof(processInfo));

const auto created = CreateProcessW(
                        pathToExe,
                        cmdLine,
                        nullptr,
                        nullptr,
                        false,
                        CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE,
                        nullptr,
                        workingDir,
                        &startupInfo,
                        &processInfo);

The exe I am running here is a console application.

At some later time, I would like to gracefully stop that process. I can kill it with TerminateProcess, but I would like to make it more graceful, as the process might have to save data to some database or perform some clean up (e.g. close hardware connections).

I tried to get the process HWND without success with EnumWindows and GetWindowThreadProcessId. In fact, EnumWindows doesn't list the process I created. With that HWND, my idea was to send a WM_CLOSE message.

Maybe I should not use the CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE flag? I tried the following startup info:

STARTUPINFO startupInfo;
ZeroMemory(&startupInfo, sizeof(startupInfo));
startupInfo.cb = sizeof(STARTUPINFO);
si.dwFlags = STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW;
si.wShowWindow = SW_SHOW;

but that does not show me a console window (which I need to have). What am I doing wrong? How should I create my process and how can I then later gracefully stop it?

CodePudding user response：

In fact, at the time where I was trying to gracefully kill my console, it was too early to get a HWND to the console window. It was in a test where I naively just created the process and then almost straightaway killed it. If I wait long enough (i.e. if I actually interact for some time with the process I created), then I can get the handle to the console window and send it a WM_CLOSE message with success.