Using batch to close open image file or word doc

Question

I am coding a choose your own adventure game. Im at the point where a player would have a choice to look at a poster or a document on a desk and the game would open a .jpg file with the poster art or document on the desk i then want the game to close the .jpg file after 5 seconds. I have found so many questions about how to close programs and .exe with batch using exit/b and taskill but there is nothing about closing specific open files viewed by a program like an image viewer. In my case, the .jpg is being opened using windows photo viewer. the title of the window is "BADGE.jpg - Windows Photo Viewer" if i could and when the game is played on another computer there might be a different default image viewer, so i need a way just to close the file regardless of what program has it open.

below is a snippet of my code. :Test1 is where my problem lies

@ECHO OFF
: START
CLS
ECHO THIS IS A TEST PROGRAM TO SHOW THE USER AN IMAGE 
ECHO OR FILE AND THEN CLOSE AFTER 5 SECONDS
PAUSE >NUL
GOTO TEST1

: TEST1 
ECHO PRESS ENTER TO OPEN IMAGE
ECHO.
PAUSE 
START "" "%~dp0\BADGE.jpg" 
PING -n 2 0.0.0.0 1>NUL
exit "%~dp0\BADGE.jpg" 
:: TASKKILL /F /IM BADGE.jpg
PAUSE
goto end


: end
echo.
echo IF THE IMAGE CLOSED AFTER 5 SECONDS THEN THIS TEST WAS A SUCCESSFUL
PAUSE
GOTO START

Answer 1

use the /fi switch (Filter), where wildcards are allowed:

taskkill /fi "windowtitle eq BADGE.jpg"

Doesn't matter, if * is - Windows Photo Viewer or - IrfanView or something different - as long, as the window title starts with the given file name.

Downside: it will kill every process with the given window title (although it's not very likely, there are more than one)

Note: start starts another cmd window - this is not needed, use just "%~dp0\BADGE.jpg" instead, which will open the jpg wtih it's default application. Also exit doesn't work, as you seem to think. You can't exit another process, you will always exit your batch file.

Answer 2

I've tested below script that I believe will work for you;

@echo off start file9876.jpg timeout 5 for /F "tokens=2 delims= " %%i in ('tasklist /v /fo table ^| findstr /i file9876') do set pid=%%i taskkill /PID %pid%

It's best if the file you want to open/display has a very unique name so you can put it in the findstr command. In my case its file9876. Don't put a full file name with the extension - your program might not display it. If it also doesn't display a file name too just open it manually and check window name (that's what the script looks looks for). And very important - don't move timeout line after the loop because your program might not actually be able to start enough and it won't be included in the task list so it won't find it and it will stay open (also tested on my own skin).

You can improve it to check if the program actually started and then look for the PID, also check if it was closed etc - some basic check to make it more bulletproof.

I tried to make this script as short and neat as possible - hope this helps you :)