Re: Serialize processes

DLLs do not contain processes. Do you mean that "In my DLL, I launch a
child process,
which must wait until all other instances of the child process have
terminated"? That's
yet a DIFFERENT question (this is not a question of English vs. your
native language, but
a question of stating the problem correctly; it is language-independent).

In that case, you can simply use a named mutex. I had exactly this
problem with one
third-party application; until the application had successfully started, I
could not try
to start a second copy because it was not written thread-safe. In that
case, what I did
was as follows:

HANDLE lock = ::CreateMutex(NULL, FALSE,
_T("Lock-out-process-<guid-here>"));
DWORD result = ::WaitForSingleObject(lock, timeout);
switch(result)
  { /* result */
   case WAIT_TIMEOUT:
     ... deal with timeout here
  case WAIT_OBJECT_0:
      break;
   case WAIT_ABANDONED_0:
      ... deal with abandoned mutex
  default:
      ASSERT(FALSE);
      ... deal with unknown problem here
   } /* result */

...CreateProcess(...);

DWORD processresult = WaitForSingleObject(processinfo.hProcess, timeout2);

switch(result)
   { /* process result */
    case WAIT_TIMEOUT:
        ...deal with timeout...
    case WAIT_OBJECT_0:
         break;
    default:
        ASSERT(FALSE); // error
        ... deal with error...
   } /* process result */

::ReleaseMutex(lock);
::CloseHandle(lock);

Do this in a separate thread because you don't want to block the GUI
thread.
joe

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 08:06:32 +0200, "Hans Stoessel"
<hstoessel.list@pm-medici.ch> wrote:


Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
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