Can Python kill a child process that keeps on running?

[I. Myself]

Steve Holden wrote:
> I. Myself wrote:
>> Serge Orlov wrote:
>>
>>> I. Myself wrote:
>>>  
>>>
>>>> Suppose we spawn a child process with Popen.  I'm thinking of an
>>>> executable file, like a compiled C program.
>>>> Suppose it is supposed to run for one minute, but it just keeps going
>>>> and going.  Does Python have any way to kill it?
>>>>
>>>> This is not hypothetical; I'm doing it now, and it's working pretty
>>>> well, but I would like to be able to handle this run-on condition.  
>>>> I'm
>>>> using Windows 2000, but I want my program to be portable to linux.
>>>>    
>>>
>>> On linux it's pretty easy to do, just setup alarm signal. On windows
>>> it's not so trivial to the point you cannot do it using python.org
>>> distribution, you will need to poke in low level C API using win32
>>> extensions or ctypes. AFAIK twisted package <http://twistedmatrix.com>
>>> has some code to help you. Also take a look at buildbot sources
>>> <http://buildbot.sf.net> that uses twisted. Buildbot has the same
>>> problem as you have, it needs to kill run away or non-responding
>>> processes.
>>>  
>>
>> That is bad news.   Thanks anyway; bad news is better than no news.
>>
> Note, however, that ctypes is planned to be a part of the 2.5 
> distribution, so while there may not be a platform-independent way to 
> achieve your goals you will at leats be able to do so without external 
> extensions.
I'm an intermediate Python programmer.  Can you explain to me how ctypes 
will let me kill a child process?

Thanks,

Mitchell Timin

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