Use R to kill tasks on Windows

taskkill-pipeline.R

# for checking and installing packages
# extracted from CRAmisc package
#   https://github.com/curtisalexander/CRAmisc/blob/master/R/install.R
check_install <- function(pkgs, repos = NULL, ...) {
  installed_packages <- installed.packages()[ ,1]
  for (i in seq_along(pkgs)) {
    pkg <- pkgs[[i]]
    if (!pkg %in% installed_packages) {
      cat(paste0("Need to install: ", pkg, "\n"))
      if(is.null(repos)) install.packages(pkg, repos = "https://cran.rstudio.com")
      else install.packages(pkg, repos = repos, ...)
    } else cat(paste0(pkg, " already installed\n"))
  }
  invisible(pkgs)
}

req_pkgs <- list(
  "dplyr",
  "processx",
  "purrr",
  "readr"
)

check_install(req_pkgs)


# list of applications to kill
kill_list <- c(
  "calc.exe",
  "notepad.exe"
)


# callback
cb <- function(line, proc) {
 cat(line, "\n") 
}


# kill tasks using a single pipeline
taskkill <- function(klist) {
  processx::run(commandline = "tasklist /fo csv") %$%
    stdout %>%
    readr::read_csv() %>%
    dplyr::filter(`Image Name` %in% klist) %$%
    PID %>%
    purrr::walk(~ processx::run(commandline = paste0("taskkill /f /pid ", .),
                                error_on_status = FALSE,
                                stdout_line_callback = cb,
                                stderr_line_callback = cb))
}

taskkill(kill_list)