In the core.thread library, there is a method isRunning() which takes a thread.

To make code more portable, rather than use a system call or getenv(), how might
isRunning() be adapted to check if a program is running?
Ideally: isrunning(program_name);

On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:38:58 -0400, Dsmith <Dsmith@nomail.com> wrote:

> In the core.thread library, there is a method isRunning() which takes a thread.
>
> To make code more portable, rather than use a system call or getenv(), how might
> isRunning() be adapted to check if a program is running?
> Ideally: isrunning(program_name);

It cannot.  isRunning checks a local boolean, it does not do any OS queries.

Now, once you have a reference to a running process, I'd say it's probably possible to add isRunning methods that call on the OS functions.  Given a process ID, getting information about the process is pretty straightforward.  I think this might be a good addition to std.process if it's not already in there.

It's just the getting of the pid based on the name is not straightforward.

-Steve

On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:05:02 +0100, Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:38:58 -0400, Dsmith <Dsmith@nomail.com> wrote:
>
>> In the core.thread library, there is a method isRunning() which takes a thread.
>>
>> To make code more portable, rather than use a system call or getenv(), how might
>> isRunning() be adapted to check if a program is running?
>> Ideally: isrunning(program_name);
>
> It cannot.  isRunning checks a local boolean, it does not do any OS queries.
>
> Now, once you have a reference to a running process, I'd say it's probably possible to add isRunning methods that call on the OS functions.  Given a process ID, getting information about the process is pretty straightforward.  I think this might be a good addition to std.process if it's not already in there.
>
> It's just the getting of the pid based on the name is not straightforward.

.. on unix systems. :p

In the past I've had to parse "ps" output on various platforms.  On Windows it's a great deal easier.

-- 
Using Opera's revolutionary email client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:

> It's just the getting of the pid based on the name is not straightforward.

There's an open standard for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Information_Model_%28computing%29