killer redux

I was laboring under the bastard conception that when using subprocess.Popen(), shell=True is required for a subprocess executable to have access to the environment variables. Where the hell did I get that idea? Stupid unquestioned assumption that almost gave birth to a lasting bug.

For the test runner I was using system calls to taskkill or pskill for process controll under windows. The idea was to try executing each and if one was on the %PATH% the return code would not be one of err. If this was the case then the search was over and a Popen wrapper of (taskkill|pskill) would suffice as an os.kill().

This worked fine and dandy except that on windows98, there would be no error code if either of the task killers weren't on the path. It would define a useless os.kill.

Lenard, the windows maintainer of PyGame questioned why use a hacky wrapper of pskill or one of it's ilk, when if there was already a reliance on pywin32, why not use win32api.TerminateProcess?

That works fine but does not kill process trees, something I thought was a requirement due to using shell = True as a Popen constructor argument. Using shell = 1 calls cmd.exe etc which in turn calls the subprocess of choice.

Realizing that there was only need to kill one process, and that it would also avoid problems with differing return codes on older versions of windows, TerminateProcess was given the job.

Long live TerminateProcess.