Windows System Programming Third Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Waiting for a Process to Terminate

The simplest, and most limited, method of synchronizing with another process is to wait for that process to complete. The general-purpose Windows wait functions introduced here have several interesting features.

• The functions can wait for many different types of objects; process handles are just the first use of the wait functions.

• The functions can wait for a single process, the first of several specified processes, or all processes in a group to complete.

• There is an optional time-out period.

The two general-purpose wait functions wait for synchronization objects to become signaled. The system sets a process handle, for example, to the signaled state when the process terminates or is terminated. The wait functions, which will get lots of future use, are as follows:

DWORD WaitForSingleObject (
HANDLE hObject,
DWORD dwMilliseconds)

DWORD WaitForMultipleObjects (
DWORD nCount,
CONST HANDLE *lpHandles,
BOOL fWaitAll,
DWORD dwMilliseconds)

Return: The cause of the wait completion, or 0XFFFFFFFF for an error (use GetLastError for more information).

Specify either a single process handle (hObject) or an array of distinct object handles in the array referenced by lpHandles. nCount, the size of the array, should not exceed MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS (defined as 64 in WINNT.H).Chapter 8.Chapter 8 along with mutex handles.