Deliberately crashing an external process under Windows

Question

I would like to synthesise a native code fault. This is so that we can see where in particular some debugging output gets put when that occurrs.

Pskill (from Sys-Internals) causes a graceful exit. DotCrash.exe doesn't seem to be available anymore from Microsoft directly.

Is there any way to externally cause a crash in a process?

Answer 1

I've done this before using windbg by:

1. Starting the process
2. Attaching to the process with windbg
3. Setting a breakpoint on one of my app's functions
4. Running the app until I hit the breakpoint
5. In windbg setting a local variable to something that will cause an Access Violation (e.g. set a pointer to 0xFFFFFFFF or muck with the register values)
6. hit f5 and the app should hopefully crash