Monitoring a process in Windows

Question

How can I monitor a Windows process and start it up if it is not running? I'd like to have something that starts up as a Windows service and can handle multiple processes.

EDIT: Hopefully there's a ready to use library/component I can use and just tweak or configure instead of having to implement it from scratch. I know in the *nix world of two popular packages: god and monit.

Answer 1

You can create a Windows Service that just watches the current process list.

EnumProcesses provides the means of seeing processes running currently. There are many APIs available to start a new process, including:

• system()
• _exec()
• WinExec()
• ShellExecute()/ShellExecuteEx()
• CreateProcess()
• CreateProcessAsUser()
• CreateProcessWithLogonW()

If you're using other languages/frameworks, they often provide their own wrappers around the above.