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Message:

determining Process death

Posted by ted lin on December 18, 2000 at 2:35 PM

I am launching separate java classes in their own processes. I need to be able to determine if the spawned process dies or gets killed by external forces (eg. task manager in Windows). I think I can poll the Process.exitValue() and if it doesn't throw an exception, it's still running. However, this is a bit awkward. Am I better off creating a "heartbeat" daemon thread in the classes that are spawned? In this case, I still don't have a handle to the new Runtime so I can't check isAlive() (or can I?). So, it could output a magic string every second or so, which I could read from Process.getInputStream. Does this make any sense? Should I put down the crack pipe? Thanks for your help.l