Wonderful people (who have helped me so very much in the past)

I need to launch a program from a Perl script in WinXP/2K. While I can easily do 'system...' (which DOES work) that is not the end of the story. You see, if the program is already launched (by a previous invocation of my script, or someone else) I DON'T want to launch it again (the application really barfs if you do!). So, how do I tell if a program is running. Were this Linux, or similar, I'd look at the output of 'ps' and parse that. Alas, this is Windows, and even though I've got cygwin [sp?] the 'ps' output isn't anything close to having enough information that I desire. I've looked at such things as Win32::OLE and Win32::Process and they won't tell me what I want to know. There ought to be a 'simple' way I can tell if a particular program is running somewhere on the system. Then again, this is Windows, and nothing is 'simple' (*SIGH*).


In reply to Is the program there? (W32) by herby1620

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.