I am writing program and when the user launch my program, my program will detect whether the user has launch abiword. If he does, my program will kill it before doing some job for the user.

How can I do that? In C++ please.......
How can I detect the "abiword" program present?
How can I kill it? I only know the word not the pid.......

Thank you...............

You can use fork a new process "killall" and give it the argument "abiword".

Thanx, but is there any elegant way to do that by code not forking?

With out forking To solve that problem, I think you have to look into /proc directory and get the pids of processes with the name abiword. When ever you get a match just send a kill signal to it. This method is an indirect way( bulky one ) . But it avoids the creation of another process.
This is not elegant way .
Tell me Why dont you want to use fork();

Ok, I am happy enough now to kill spesific application which I know the name but not the pid by forking() but how can I detect the presence of spesific application? So when the user run my program, it will pop up like this:
"upps, you are running abiword. I don't like it. I will kill it!!!! "
and it will kill abiword by forking() but first I need to know how can I detect abiword?
You said by looking into proc directory. I have no clue how to do that way?

see /proc/ * / stat file or /proc/ */cmdline
Contains the executable file names.
There * is the pid of the currently executing process.
If you have any doubts feel free to ask me.
Just explore the /proc directory.

This is the way of reading a directory entry name from proc directory;

void Read_Proc( char copt )
{

DIR *dfd; /* A pointer to hold the pointer ret by opendir */
struct dirent *rdir_ent; /* A pointer to read the dirent structure */
struct pr_det prdet; /* Holds the details about a process */
dfd = opendir( "/proc" ); /* Open the /proc dir */


/* Read the dir entries until the end of dir is read */
while( ( rdir_ent = readdir( dfd ) ) != NULL )
{

/* Check for the digit in first character of the file name */
if( isdigit( *rdir_ent->d_name ) )
{


prdet = parse_dir( rdir_ent->d_name ); /* Here you have to go in that */
/* directory open the stat or */
/* cmdline, find the exe file name*/
/* IF it matches with abiword just
/* send kill to the directory name */
/* before sending kill convert that dir
name to integer */

}

}