roslaunch has an experimental/unstable API called roslaunch.scriptapi
in ROS 1.1. You can only use it from Python, and it starts up a
roslaunch process inside your own process. In the future, roslaunch
will probably have an XMLRPC API.

Shell-invoking "rosnode kill" will generally kill another node, though
not if the node is hung. Part of the future roslaunch XMLRPC API will
allow more reliable process killing. If you are on the same machine,
you can query a node's XMLRPC API to get it's PID, and then kill using
signals. The future roslaunch API will enable remote killing.

 - Ken

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 3:18 PM, Nicholas Butko <nbutko@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> What is the best way to invoke roslaunch from within ros? What is the best way to kill another node from within another node?
>
> For example, one node may want to start another (or a set of other nodes) for only a short time.
>
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