Is Process Running

[Christian_Schmitz]

Well, as I told you, an app is responsive if it responds to messages within a good time. So if you send a ping like message, you can see if it’s processed before timeout or not.
And I bet Windows has internally much more ways to know if the message queue is processed.

[Michel_Bujardet]

@89903:@Nathan Wright

I have just tested Michels suggestion and it works really well and what I am going to do is check if the tasklist.exe exists before I do the shell and if not stop the program running cleanly. Thanks for the help.

Unless the IT manager has really made it impossible, you can even store a copy of tasklist.exe within your program and recreate it if it has been deleted. Windows having yet no chmod you can execute it. Then if necessary remove it if you want to leave no traces

[scott_boss]

@89843:@Michel Bujardet

Unfortunately, Grep does not exists in Windows

this is not 100% true. it is doesnt come with windows. but all the standard *nix commands are available via gnuwin32 including grep.

[Michel_Bujardet]

@89903:@Nathan Wright

I am going to do is check if the tasklist.exe exists before I do the shell and if not stop the program running cleanly.

I just checked on Windows 8.1 and found 4 different copies of tasklist.exe in various directories :

• c:\Windows\System32\tasklist.exe
• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\tasklist.exe
• C:\Windows\WinSxS\amd64_microsoft-windows-tasklist_31bf3856ad364e35_6.3.9600.16384_none_1901923c2e48ab03\tasklist.exe
• C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft-windows-tasklist_31bf3856ad364e35_6.3.9600.16384_none_bce2f6b875eb39cd\tasklist.exe

All of them are part of the regular install and have the same date stamp, but there seems to be two different versions ; one for 32 and one for 64 bit (my system is 64). Looks as if Microsoft precisely wanted to safeguard a copy in case of deletion or something.

@89928:@scott boss

this is not 100% true. it is doesnt come with windows. but all the standard *nix commands are available via gnuwin32 including grep.

You are right. I was referring to plain ol’ Windows, though.

Gnuwin32 is an interesting project I was not aware of. Some of the utilities inside could be the solution to a lot of things. Then the problem becomes the GNU license, which apparently limits distribution with commercial software in ways that are unclear in the highly legalize jargon on the GPL. But that is another topic I am going to try and read more.

[John_Hansen]

@89782:@Nathan Wright

I need to write a Windows console app that checks if a program is running e.g. winword.exe or if it is not responding and if not then return an errorlevel of 1 so that I can then notify someone if the program dies. I am sure I read somewhere on the forum of some way to do this but cannot find it in my searches. Anyone have an idea how I can check the status of a process / application. Thanks.

This will do: https://forum.xojo.com/conversation/post/89708

if it is not responding and if not then return an errorlevel

See this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394372(v=vs.85).aspx for information you can apply to code

[Tanner_Lee1 (Tanner Lee)]

@89899:@Nathan Wright

I have sysadmins who do things that you would never think of e.g. renaming taskmgr.exe, cmd.exe,

That brought a smile to my face!