How to avoid users to invoke an app (exe) already running

[Edmilson Bringel]

Hi All,

I was thinking about to access the windows task manager and check about the image name at the proccess tab...but I don't know how to do that (which os call and the parameters...).
Any help (or other suggestion) will be very appreciated.

Thanks a lot!

Edi

[marten]

If you are talking about VASMalltalk applications, I rename my "abt.exe" to the application name I wanted to have. Then I have "only" to query
the running process list if this application is running.

For that you must search the process list and for that you may look at: http://www.schrievkrom.de/blog/?p=229

[koschate]

I don't recall the implementation details exactly, but in the past I've done this by grabbing a system-level semaphore when the application is invoked. Subsequent attempts to invoke the application will fail as a result.

[nmongeau]

You can use this command-line argument:

-singleinstance
On Windows and OS/2, the -singleinstance option specifies that only a single instance of the associated executable can be running at the same time. Thus, specifying this option when you start the VA Smalltalk product executable abt.exe runs one instance of abt.exe and prevents you from running another instance of abt.exe at the same time.

Normand

[Michael Keppler]

All those solutions (except for the semaphore) don' really help. You can easily copy/paste/rename the executable and run a second instance that way. To check whether another instance is already running, I suggest to create a mutex with a known name and check if that operation worked (there was no mutex with the same name, so also no other instance) or not (other instance with same mutex name already running).

see

Code: Select all

OSSecurityAttributes>>#createMutex:lpszMutexName:

For more documentation, see MSDN.