Utility of the day: closeall.exe

Closeall.exe is a great, simple little utility program for Windows that does just one thing: When run, it sends a "close" signal to each running application, as though you had clicked the application's own Close button. (Thus, each application is closed in a "friendly" manner, having a chance to prompt you if the app has an open document with pending changes that need to be saved, and so forth.)

I've been using this utility daily, running it as a first step in shutting down my computer. At the end of a typical work day, I often have many applications open, and using closeall.exe to close them all in a controlled fashion has turned out to be a very nice alternative to either the hassle of manually closing each application one-by-one prior to shutdown, or else telling Windows to shut down with all of my applications still open, and then dealing with the subsequent chaos of Windows trying to shut down all of my applications at the same time that it is also stopping background processes and performing other shutdown tasks.

Closeall.exe was written using pure Win32 API by Alexander Avdonin. You can download it from its page at Alexander's ntwind software site, here.