I am looking for different ways to pause and resume programmatically a particular process via its process ID under Windows XP.
Process suspend/resume tool does it with SuspendThread
/ ResumeThread
but warns about multi-threaded programs and deadlock problems.
PsSuspend looks okay, but I wonder if it does anything special about deadlocks or uses another method?
Prefered languages : C++ / Python
I'm not sure if this does the job, but with ProcessExplorer from MS Systernals you can suspend a process.
It's been said here: https://superuser.com/a/155263 and I found it there too.
If you "debug the debugger" (for instance, using
logger.exe
to trace all API calls made bywindbg.exe
), it appears that the debugger usesSuspendThread()
/ResumeThread()
to suspend all of the threads in the process being debugged.PsSuspend may use a different way of suspending processes (I'm not sure), but it is still possible to hang other processes: if the process you're suspending is holding a shared synchronization object that is needed by another process, you may block that other process from making any progress. If both programs are well-written, they should recover when you resume the one that you suspended, but not all programs are well-written. And if this causes your program that is doing the suspending to hang, then you have a deadlock.
read here and you also have psutil for python that you can use it like that:
I think there is a good reason why there is no SuspendProcess() function in Windows. Having such a function opens the door for an unstable system. You shall not suspend a process unless you created that process yourself. If you wrote that process yourself, you could use an event (see ::SetEvent() etc. in MSDN) or another kind of messaging to trigger a pause command in the process.
I tested http://www.codeproject.com/KB/threads/pausep.aspx on few softwares:
it works fine.
PsSuspend and Pausep are two valid options.