Kill external process

maricanis

Hi,

I'm running some external processes from my plugin.
Since they can run rather long, I would like to offer a user possibility to abort started external process. Is there some elegant way to do it in SU?

Only way I've found for now is when user press some button, I call:

taskkill /f /im my_program.exe

or

tskill my_program

(since no idea how to get PID of the external process from my Plugin, I use image name or exectuable name).

BTW: I'm running process with UI.openURL() and batch_file.
I'm using SU 8 in Windows 7 operating system.

Thanks in advance,
Marija

Dan Rathbun

You can use tlist.exe (XP) or tasklist.exe (Vista/Win7) to check when the SU process ended.

(The catch is that XP Home doesn't come with tlist.exe, it must be ... installed separately*. It comes installed standard on XP Pro, or Win Server 2003+.

is referring to the separate "Support Tools" installer on the Windows install CD.

And.. I do not know what the equivalent is on OSX.

maricanis

Thanks Dan,

For now plugin is only Windows oriented so these tasklist or tlist would do the job for listing running processes

maricanis

Hi,

I've implemented killing of external process (which is started by UI.openURL) with next method:
-call 'tasklist' - to check is process is still running and to get process PID
-then in plugin Process.kill("KILL",PID)

This approach works, but I also want to inform object that started external process that process is killed (so some timers are stopped).
I though to implement that with signals:
-after process is killed I send signal "USR1" for example
-and I trap the same signal in class that started process - and then stop timers.

Problem is that Sketchup doesn't recognize "USR1" signal.

I've tried in Ruby console:


Signal.list.keys.join ", " 
TERM, SEGV, KILL, EXIT, INT, FPE, ABRT, ILL

But none of these signals are the ones I need, I need some custom user defined signal for my plugin.

Is the thing I need possible, and how to do it in Ruby/Sketchup?

Thanks in advance,
Marija

Dan Rathbun

Just pass a reference of the timer id object, to the method that kills the process, and call UI.stop_timer(tid) from that method, after it is verified, that the process is dead.

Dan Rathbun

OR.. in object 1, write a callback method that is called from the killing object:

def deceased
  UI.stop_timer(@tid)
  # any other post death cleanup
end

Assumes you save a reference to the timer id, in object 1, when you started the timer, like:
@tid = UI.start_timer(delay,true) { # code block }

maricanis

Thanks Dan,

Your suggestion to write callback that is called from killing object, was very useful idea - and makes nice readable code.

Much better idea then various signals I planned to use before.

Thanks again,
Marija