how to kill a port's external process?

[Garry Hodgson]

Chris Pressey wrote:

> "Garrett G. Hodgson" wrote:
> > i'm building a little gui wrapper around a command line audio player.
> > i've got an erlang process that calls open_port() to spawn the external
> > player, but it doesn't actually send/receive anything to it over stdio.
> 
> I don't think the port mechanism was ever intended to be used that way
> :)

yeah, well, i live to abuse language features.

...

> So the port terminates when the read_cmd() function detects end-of-file
> from the Erlang side of things (AFAICT.)
> 
> Do you have the source to the external program?  It might help to
> rewrite the main body to listen to the Erlang ports mechanism, even if
> there's no established interface.

alas, i do not.

> This goes beyond Erlang, but... killing a process based on the name
> of a program is always dodgy at best, given that a program can change
> what it shows up as in 'ps'. 

in this case, the external program does not.  i've gotten it working
using this hack, and it works just fine for my purposes.  i expect i'll
let it be.

thanks to all for the information and tips.


-- 
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