Cygwin corrupted taskkill in windows commandline

[Voris, Ben]

> From: Earnie Boyd 
> Sent: Friday, September 21, 2012 11:29 AM
> To: cygwinAtcygwinDOTcom
> Subject: Re: Cygwin corrupted taskkill in windows commandline
> 
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Voris, Ben wrote:
> > On my system, taskkill is /cygdrive/c/Windows/system32/taskkill.  That is,
> > it is not part of Cygwin but is part of Windows.  I suspect either that your
> > PATH no longer includes /cygdrive/c/Windows/system32 or that taskkill.exe
> > has been removed from that Windows directory.
> 
> If it is 64 bit system then it will not be available in a 32 bit
> process such as Cygwin's bash in that directory.  You'll need to look
> at /cygdrive/c/Windows/sysnative/taskkill instead.
> 
> -- 
> Earnie
> -- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd
>

As I read it, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384187(v=vs.85).aspx  says that use of sysnative is optional for WOW64 applications.  However, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942589 reports a problem with directly using system32 on 64-bit version of Server 2003 and Windows XP.  Perhaps the version of Microsoft Windows is the issue?

On my Windows-7 64-bit system, sysnative is not in the path but system32 is.  On that system, taskkill seems to work from Cygwin.

: file $(type -p taskkill.exe)
/cygdrive/c/Windows/system32/taskkill.exe: PE32 executable (console) Intel 80386, for MS Windows

: $taskkill /?

TASKKILL [/S system [/U username [/P [password]]]]
         { [/FI filter] [/PID processid | /IM imagename] } [/T] [/F]

Description:
    This tool is used to terminate tasks by process id (PID) or image name.

...

C:\> dir %SYSTEMROOT%\taskkill.exe /s
...

 Directory of C:\Windows\System32

2009-07-13  18:39           112,640 taskkill.exe
               1 File(s)        112,640 bytes

 Directory of C:\Windows\SysWOW64

2009-07-13  18:14            77,824 taskkill.exe
               1 File(s)         77,824 bytes