Killing 'wineserver' doesn't close the GUI of wine applications

Question

When certain applications running under wine crash I usually just kill the process 'wineserver', since I am unable to properly identify specific process names with Windows application (if they even run on different processes - I'm not sure, I know little about this stuff).

However this accomplishes only freeing my CPU usage, since the GUIs are still opened and accessible through the dash, even though they are not responding. So my question is: what process should I kill to get rid of the artifacts from not-running-anymore Wine programs?

Answer 1

This is normal because when you run a Wine application it actually loads other apps to work together, each is it's own parent (not related) and each creates it's own childs. So to effectively kill all Wine related processes you need to use the wineserver command that comes with wine.

Instead of sudo kill -9 wineAppProcessID you would run wineserver -k

The -k parameter sends a SIGINT (Interrupt Process) signal. In the case this does not work, the signal is elevated to a SIGKILL (Kill Process Immediately), similar to a Kill -9.

The difference is that wineserver will actually search and kill all Wine processes. This is only good if you want to kill ALL wine processes (All wine applications running at the same time).

Here is an image of pstree -g when running a Wine app (In this case STALKER Call of Pripyat)

If I do a sudo kill -9 8462 it will only kill the wineserver and leave me with a GUI window stuck on zombie mode. If I however do a wineserver -k it will correctly kill all Wine related processes (8491, 8468 and 8462). For more information about other wine related commands please see How to install and configure Wine? where I took some effort in compiling almost all useful commands, wineserver being one of them.