wine-devel Digest, Vol 15, Issue 78

[Michael Ost]

Michael Ost wrote:
> Message: 7
> Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:51:34 +0200
> From: Helmar Spangenberg <hspangenberg at frey.de>
> Subject: Starting a Linux application from a Windows application
> To: wine-devel at winehq.org
> Cc: hopse at praxiscomputer.de
> Message-ID: <200610231451.35050.hspangenberg at frey.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Hello list,
> we have a Windows application "App1" which starts another application 
> "App2"
> using CreateProcessA, then doing some different work, and finally 
> waiting for
> "App2" to finish using WaitForSingleObject. It is important for "App1" to
> catch the exit code of "App2" as well as "App2's" messages on stdout. This
> works fine with Windows applications.
> 
> Unfortunately, this does not work as soon as "App2" is a Linux application;
> "App1" seems to wait forever.
> 
> Looking at the code of process.c and sync.c in kernel32, it seems to me 
> that
> wine forgets everything about the Linux process once it is started.

I had the same experience. It seems that you can't do a synchronous call 
  of a linux process from a windows one.

My solution was to create a DLL interface that implements a function 
called "linux_command". On Windows it is stubbed out, but in Linux it a 
system() type call. App1 can link against it in Windows, but do nothing. 
When you link against it at runtime in Wine, you can do the linux command.

Then I run an async bash command, capture the pid, and check for it 
later. This, after long hours of attempts and dead ends.

App1
   char out[1024];
   linux_command("App2 & echo $! > /var/tmp/my.pid", out, sizeof(out));
   linux_command("cat /var/tmp/my.pid", out, sizeof(out));

   do your work

   char command[1024];
   sprintf(command, "test -e /proc/%s || echo finished", out);
   forever
     linux_command(command, out, sizeof(out));
     if (strcmp(out, "finished") == 0)
       break
     sleep

If you are interested I can post the linux_command sources.

- Michael Ost