Killing processes from java

Question

I've got a set of programs written by various people in various languages - all of which I cant change.
They typically do build / continuous integration stuff for several projects, and have a habit of hanging and crashing a lot.
These are long running programs which run on several OS's (to be specific: windows, HP-UX, RedHat Linux AS, Solaris).
What I want to be able to do is set up a "service" (daemon program, whatever) on each box to monitor the running of these programs and kill any program when it "hangs".
For each program type, there is a strategy to determine whether it is still active or not (e.g, recently appended something to a file etc).
I want to provide the guts of the program in java because a) The people who will maintain it know java well and b) Because it has to run on several OS's.
The only thing I cant do directly in java is kill the processes (they are run independantly - and are not started by the "monitor" program).
One idea is to have a per OS script / program invoked by the monitor program to do the killing (e.g, a simple sh script on unix variants).
But Im wondering if anyone either knows of existing java OSS libraries which would let me do a "kill" in an OS agnostic way? (i.e, which already do the OS specific stuff somehow themselves).
~D

Answer 1

Killing unrelated processes goes against the spirit of java, I thinkI wasn't asking if it was somehow included in standard libraries or whatever (of which, of course, Im sure it's not).
However, the need for an application to have the ability to do a single OS specific task as part of its operation is not a good argument for saying the whole application shouldn't be written in java.
There are many good reasons why my application should be written in java (I gave two of them).
Of course, there are multiple ways to solve this:
- native calls and a per OS lib to do the killing
- Execution of an external program to do the killing (as suggested in my post)
Im happy to do the grunt work using one of the above methods if I have to, I was just wondering if there were existing OSS libraries which already did it (just like there are OSS libraries which allow java applications to put icons in a windows task bar, for instance).