pkill.exe: what does it do?

[DanBrumm]

We started to have all kinds of issues with out Enterprise site about two weeks ago. Upon further investigation we found that Symantec was stopping PKILL.exe from executing. Once we added the exception to Symantec everything started to operate normally again. 

What does pkill.exe do?  I did some Googling but I could not find any documentation on it. 

[Arne_Gelfert]

Did you see this article?

Problem: McAfee logs show that ArcGIS Server pkill.exe attempts to terminate McAfee processes 

Pkills is used to stop a process using PID.

The EXE is here: C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Server\bin\pkill.exe.

[DanBrumm]

I did see that article but am still confused by what pkill does as a function of ArcGIS.  In the Symantec logs I saw that pkill was trying to run on our ArcGIS Server and Data Store boxes. Is pkill only used to end processes and if it cant run what are the consequences?

[Arne_Gelfert]

Now, I'm just as curious as you are. I'll let you know if I find anything else.

[MichaelVolz]

Has anyone on this post determined that pkill.exe has anyone issues with anti-virus or anti-malware software?  My server is showing errors in Event Viewer that CiscoSecureEndpoint is detecting pkill.exe for the DataStore as a potential threat.

[sondickerson]

You probably figured this out already, but, if not, this ESRI Support article may be of help:

https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/problem-cpu-utilization-on-an-arcgis-enterprise-machin...