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From: gl8f@astsun7.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st.tech
Subject: Re: PS problem, and DA problem!!!
Message-ID: <1990Sep23.230318.14193@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 23 Sep 90 23:03:18 GMT
References: <2384.26fca905@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu> <7106.26fcfbec@uwovax.uwo.ca>
Sender: news@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU
Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
Lines: 27

In article <7106.26fcfbec@uwovax.uwo.ca> 7103_2622@uwovax.uwo.ca (Eric Smith) writes:
>In article <2384.26fca905@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu>, rlcollins@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (Ryan 'Gozar' Collins) writes:
>> 	2. Also, I am writing a DA that needs to know if there is a program
>> running or not. Is there an easy way to check this?
>> 
>
>There's always a program running (the GEM DESKTOP is just an ordinary TOS
>program, loaded from ROM instead of from disk). If you mean, "is the
>currently running program not the desktop", you might try the shel_read
>AES call:

[...]

There's another problem, if I recall correctly -- shel_read() will
return the name of a GEM program even after you exit, until you start
another one from the desktop. I recall seeing this in a magazine
article about using desktop accessories to send special messages to
programs that allowed extensions that way: you can't be sure the user
is actually running that program if shel_read() says it's so.

Don't know if this was fixed in TOS 1.4.

Ryan, can you tell us WHY you need to know if a program is running?

--
"Perhaps I'm commenting a bit cynically, but I think I'm qualified to."
                                              - Dan Bernstein