How to check if a process is running via a batch s

Question

How can I check if an application is running from a batch (well cmd) file?

I need to not launch another instance if a program is already running. (I can't change the app to make it single instance only.)

Also the application could be running as any user.

Answer 1

TrueY's answer seemed the most elegant solution, however, I had to do some messing around because I didn't understand what exactly was going on. Let me clear things up to hopefully save some time for the next person.

TrueY's modified Answer:

::Change the name of notepad.exe to the process .exe that you're trying to track
::Process names are CASE SENSITIVE, so notepad.exe works but Notepad.exe does NOT
::Do not change IMAGENAME
::You can Copy and Paste this into an empty batch file and change the name of
::notepad.exe to the process you'd like to track
::Also, some large programs take a while to no longer show as not running, so
::give this batch a few seconds timer to avoid a false result!!

@echo off
SETLOCAL EnableExtensions

set EXE=notepad.exe

FOR /F %%x IN ('tasklist /NH /FI "IMAGENAME eq %EXE%"') DO IF %%x == %EXE% goto ProcessFound

goto ProcessNotFound

:ProcessFound

echo %EXE% is running
goto END
:ProcessNotFound
echo %EXE% is not running
goto END
:END
echo Finished!

Anyway, I hope that helps. I know sometimes reading batch/command-line can be kind of confusing sometimes if you're kind of a newbie, like me.

Answer 2

I used the script provided by Matt (2008-10-02). The only thing I had trouble with was that it wouldn't delete the search.log file. I expect because I had to cd to another location to start my program. I cd'd back to where the BAT file and search.log are, but it still wouldn't delete. So I resolved that by deleting the search.log file first instead of last.

del search.log

tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq myprog.exe" /FO CSV > search.log

FOR /F %%A IN (search.log) DO IF %%-zA EQU 0 GOTO end

cd "C:\Program Files\MyLoc\bin"

myprog.exe myuser mypwd

:end

Answer 3

Under Windows you can use Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to ensure that no apps with the specified command line is launched, for example:

wmic process where (name="nmake.exe") get commandline | findstr /i /c:"/f load.mak" /c:"/f build.mak" > NUL && (echo THE BUILD HAS BEEN STARTED ALREADY! > %ALREADY_STARTED% & exit /b 1)

Answer 4

I don't know how to do so with built in CMD but if you have grep you can try the following:

tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq myApp.exe" | grep myApp.exe
if ERRORLEVEL 1 echo "myApp is not running"

Answer 5

The answer provided by Matt Lacey works for Windows XP. However, in Windows Server 2003 the line

 tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq notepad.exe" /FO CSV > search.log

returns

INFO: No tasks are running which match the specified criteria.

which is then read as the process is running.

I don't have a heap of batch scripting experience, so my soulution is to then search for the process name in the search.log file and pump the results into another file and search that for any output.

tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq notepad.exe" /FO CSV > search.log

FINDSTR notepad.exe search.log > found.log

FOR /F %%A IN (found.log) DO IF %%~zA EQU 0 GOTO end

start notepad.exe

:end

del search.log
del found.log

I hope this helps someone else.

Answer 6

I'm assuming windows here. So, you'll need to use WMI to get that information. Check out The Scripting Guy's archives for a lot of examples on how to use WMI from a script.