note 37108 deleted from ref.com by danbrown

Note Submitter: feelingflash at hotmail dot com ---- PROBLEM QUITTING MICROSOFT EXCEL I have been trying to solve the problem of terminating the excel process when using the COM functionality. I found a few 'supposed fixes' including not using arrays etc but none of them seemed to work. Example: $excel->application->Quit(); $excel->Quit(); None of these variants properly quit the process - ONLY the visible application. Several hours of using your code would leave thousands of excel processes running invisibly in the background and eating all your ram very quickly. As I was developing on a solution designed to work on clients running windows, my solution was to install microsofts 'kill.exe' into the windows directory and then run it using: shell_exec("kill excel.exe"); One problem is because kill.exe is an add on utility, some clients running windows will not have it. The solution is then to use file_exists(filename) to detect for the file and then if not present, let the user download it. Example: $killApp = "C:\WINDOWS\KILL.EXE"; if (file_exists($killApp)) { # continue } else { # show message and link to kill.exe download }