How to see if a program is running.

Log to your UV account and in the VOC you should see the PORT.STATUS command there.  You can create the same VOC item in your working account.

That worked, but the phantom port that I started the program on is showing unavailable and not the program name that I ran.  Is there a way to see that?

Troy,

Take a look at PORT.STATUS:

PORT.STATUS [USER name] [PORT number] [DEVICE pathname] [PID process#]
[FILEMAP] [LAYER.STACK] [MFILE.HIST] [LOCK.HIST] [{ENABLE | DISABLE}
LOCK.HIST] [ODBC.CONNECTIONS] [LPTR] [RUNNING] [SUSPENDED]

The PORT.STATUS command with no options produces a report that looks like this:

>PORT.STATUS
There are currently 5 UniVerse sessions; 5 interactive, 0 phantom
Pid.. User name. Who Port name.. Last command processed...........
6002 walter 13 /dev/ttyp2 PORT.STATUS
5047 cac 16 /dev/ttyp8 LIST CONTACTS <<I2,Enter vendor id>>
5812 barbara 26 /dev/ttypd SELECT IB WITH DESC LIKE '...LOCATE...'
5844 tamara 47 /dev/ttyq8 LIST IB LONG.DESC FIXED.AT.ANY

As a technique you could also add a BASIC lock to a specific program - e.g. LOCK 1. This is a system semaphore lock and can be tested by other programs - viz: LOCK 1 ELSE... If the lock is not set then the program is not running.

Regards

JJ

What I am trying to do is to create a process that will start a program as a phantom if it is not already running so that it does not get started again.  Tell me if this would work.  If I added a line of code to the program that I want to run in a phantom that locked a record in a control file and then check for that record lock and if it is locked, that would mean the process is already running.  If it get's killed for some reason, the lock would automatically be released, correct?

Your logic sounds correct to control the number of processes running at a time.  The release of the lock as result of a process being killed is not guaranteed but majority of the cases it would.

You could also check the LOCK command, but that lock will not be released on a semaphore lock unless it is explicitly released by a corresponding UNLOCK command. Even if the process is  terminated.