Pfthb

I synchronize my documents using Google's sync program. However, I don't want the sync program meddling with my project files when I have certain programs open. My attempted solution is below.

This is a really clunky way to attempt to turn off program A when program B launches, then turn program A back on when program B stops running. The batch script below does this effectively, but it takes a sizable chunk of processor power (between 1 and 4% on my mobile i5 8th gen). Is there a more elegant way to do this? I'm willing to consider other tools (ie, AutoIT).

EDIT, per suggestion, I added a simple 15-second timeout at the end, which makes this program acceptably processor intensive (ie, not). Running this via task scheduler as hidden makes this a working solution.

@echo off
rem mutually exclusive program enforcer

rem initialize variables
set gDriveOn=init
set reaperOn=init

rem begin infinite loop for monitoring on states
:loopStart

 tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq reaper.exe" 2>NUL | find /I /N "reaper.exe">NUL
if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" (
 set reaperOn="TRUE" 
 goto gDrivecheck
 )

rem else if reaper not found
set reaperOn="FALSE"

:gDriveCheck 
 tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq googledrivesync.exe" 2>NUL | find /I /N "googledrivesync.exe">NUL
if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" (
 set gDriveOn="TRUE" 
 goto doStuff
 )

rem else if Google Drive not found
set gDriveOn="FALSE"

:doStuff
rem turn off gdrive when reaper is on
if %reaperOn% == "TRUE" (
 if %gDriveOn% == "TRUE" (
 taskkill /f /t /im googledrivesync.exe
 )
 )

if %reaperOn% == "FALSE" (
 if %gDriveOn% == "FALSE" (
 start C:"Program Files"GoogleDrivegoogledrivesync.exe
 )
 )

rem delay 15 seconds for efficiency
timeout 15
goto :loopStart
)
rem end of infinite loop
)

Because posted source code doesn't run I won't yet attempt to answer stability part of the question. See my former comment on suggestion how to debug it yourself.

As for performance:

Batch file delays

if I didn't miss anything, this code is constantly requesting if a pair of processes exist. That is, it starts the next check right after previous one completes, again and again with no pause inbetween.

This basically instructs your computer to devote all available processing power to checking process existence. This program should theoretically be using 100% CPU, but since for some reason listing tasks under Windows is slow and inefficient, and you probably have more that one CPU core, and batch processing is slow itself it only is able to use a fraction of CPU.

You most likely do not need to check processes that frequently. This is usually done once in 1 to 10 seconds. If this is acceptable, insert a delay somewhere in the code like this:

TIMEOUT /T 5 /NOBREAK

where 5 is seconds to wait. See timeout /? or this for more information.

AutoIT

In AutoIt you will need ProcessExists() to check process existence and Sleep() to insert a delay. Killing a process is accomplished with ProcessClose() and Run() starts one. The documentation is available here under Function Reference

Checking processes on windows is still slow and inefficient. AutoIT documentation suggests that the process is polled approximately every 250 milliseconds which probably implies that if you try to request it any faster you will get results it saved from the last time, so it makes sense to insert a Sleep(250) or more.

However, this mostly applies to querying process by name which requests a list of all running processes and searches yours in it. This does not need to be done if you know a process already exists - you can simply use its Process ID number (PID) to check if it stopped - which should be faster. So instead of just ProcessExists("notepad.exe") you could do something like this:

local $pid = 0
while true
 if ($pid <> 0) then $pid = ProcessExists($pid) ;Process already existed, use PID
 if ($pid = 0) then $pid = ProcessExists("notepad.exe") ;Process did not exist
 if ($pid <> 0) then 
 ;do something if process exists...
 endif
 sleep(300)
 .........
wend

This works because ProcessExists() returns PID if process exists or 0 if not.
First if line runs if $pid was already known from last time we checked.
If it wasn't or if we never checked before or if it was but no longer exists then second line runs and does the check based on process name. This should be repeated for the second process. Please note this is intentionally not if-then-else because 1st check may set $pid to 0.

EXE replacement

If the solutions above do not work -- for example because the reaper.exe just crashes horribly if it happens to attempt accessing something googledrivesync.exe is holding -- then something else should probably be done.

One option is to rename reaper.exe to real_reaper.exe and compile an autoit script into new reaper.exe that kills googledrivesync and starts real_reaper.exe. This script needs to pass all parameters so something like

RunWait ('"real_reaper.exe" ' & $CmdLineRaw)

should do the trick. This waits for real_reaper.exe to finish running and then you can do Run("googledrivesync.exe")

This may not work properly if the program that starts reaper.exe uses some tricks but it should work in most cases.