On Jun 9, 9:11 pm, Magdy <magdy....@gmail.com> wrote:
How to allow just one instance to be running from c++
application exe?!
More details:
Platform: windows, but I prefer a cross-platform solution...
If the user ran the exe and there is another instance
already running, the new exe sends message (ex. string) to
the running one and terminate.
Any ideas and/or thoughts will be much appreciated. :-)
There's no standard solution; the usual solution under Unix
(which should also work under Windows) is to atomically
create a file with the process id of the program in a fixed
location. The "atomically" means that you'll have to use
some platform specific requests, not simple ofstream. Under
Unix, this is done by using the modes O_EXCL | O_CREAT in
the open request, under Windows, there is a flag CREATE_NEW
for CreateFile which sounds like it would do the same thing.
If the open succeeds, you're fine. If it fails, and the
error is EEXIST (Unix) or ERROR_FILE_EXISTS (Windows), then
either another instance of the executable is running, or a
previous instance didn't terminate cleanly, and failed to
delete the file. (To solve the problem concerning failing
to delete the file: use a small batch script to start your
program, which deletes the file when your program has
finished, regardless of why it finished, and add an
automatic action on booting to delete the file.) Any other
error, of course, is a serious problem, and probably means
that your program wasn't installed correctly.
A robust solution is to create the file with no O_EXCL flag.
And then try locking it. If locking fails, then another
instance of the application is holding it. If the application