Closing handles

A process can close the handles that it owns. Closing a handle terminates the association between an ID and a resource, thereby releasing the ID. Closing a handle does not invalidate its ancestors and descendants (in contrast to revoking a handle, which actually invalidates the descendants of the handle). In other words, the ancestors and descendants of a closed handle can still be used to provide access to the resource that they identify. Also, closing a handle does not disrupt the handle inheritance tree associated with the resource identified by the particular handle. The place of a closed handle is occupied by its ancestor. In other words, the ancestor of a closed handle becomes the direct ancestor of the descendants of the closed handle.

To close the handle, call the KnHandleClose() function.

If each handle of a system resource in all processes that own these handles are revoked (see "Revoking handles") or closed, this system resource will be deleted.

Information about API functions is provided in the table below.

handle_api.h functions