Re: start and stop a program by make

Hi Martin,

you may take a look at the "start" command in Windows, http://ss64.com/nt/start.html
Unless you specify the option "/wait", it will do what you seem to need.
If your program doesn't provide its own window, you may need to add a separate CMD shell, like in
  start cmd.exe /c "dir c:\ /P"
And since "Start" seems to be a built-in command for CMD.EXE, for make to perform the operation you may need an extra CMD call in the make rule or provide a batch file for the commands in the make rule:
MyRule:
  cmd /c "start myprogram.exe"
Combinations possible, and possibly necesary.

HTH,

Johan
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Subject: start and stop a program by make
Sent: Mon, 19 Oct 2009
From: Martin Mensch

Hello, I was posting this already in help-make, and Paul Smith advised me to try it here. So first my original posting and then a part of the answer of Paul which is related to UNIX. Maybe someone knows how things are with WinXP. my original posting:I would like to start a program by using a make rule. I know that compilers and so on are all programs. The ones that I want to start do not finish and so don't send an error code back and as much as I have seen make then just waits for the error code to come. Here is an example: my_rule:
    program1.exe arg1 arg2
    program2.exe arg1 arg2 This should start program1 and leave it running and then start program2 and leave it running.
But what I see is this:
program1 starts and nothing else happens. When I manually stop program1 then program2 starts. Another very good thing would be to have a rule like this: my_rule:
    stop program1
    stop program2 If they are not running it should do nothing, maybe the '-' prefix will do this? (using make 3.81 under WinXP)  part of Pauls answer:There is no way for make to not wait for a program. If you had a UNIX system with a normal shell, you could put the process
into the background, like this:  foo:
  program1 &
  program2 & (the "&" tells the shell to put the program into the background).  You
mentioned you're using Windows, but I don't know if you're using Cygwin
(which has, I believe, a UNIX-style shell) or MingW or whatever.  I
don't know how to put a program into the background on Windows.
 I don't use Cygwin, as much as I know my GNU stuff is based on MinGW. But I am not an expert on this. Thank you for any help Martin

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