external file closed

[kilnhead]

I am opening a file using os.start('myfile.pdf') from python. How can I
know when the user has closed the file so I can delete it? Thanks.

 

[Jerry]

I am opening a file using os.start('myfile.pdf') from python. How can I
know when the user has closed the file so I can delete it? Thanks.

I assume you mean os.startfile. There is no way to do this directly.
os.startfile simply hands off the call to the OS and doesn't provide
anything to track anything after that. Since you won't know what
program handled the file association, you couldn't watch for an
instance of that to start up and detect when it exits. Even if you
could, it wouldn't be reliable as in the case of PDF's and Adobe
Acrobat Reader, the user could close the document, but not the
application, so your script would never delete the file in question.

If anyone can think of a way to do this, it would be interesting to see
how it's done.

 

[utabintarbo]

I assume you mean os.startfile. There is no way to do this directly.
os.startfile simply hands off the call to the OS and doesn't provide
anything to track anything after that. Since you won't know what
program handled the file association, you couldn't watch for an
instance of that to start up and detect when it exits. Even if you
could, it wouldn't be reliable as in the case of PDF's and Adobe
Acrobat Reader, the user could close the document, but not the
application, so your script would never delete the file in question.

If anyone can think of a way to do this, it would be interesting to see
how it's done.

os.system('myfile.pdf') will give return code upon closing. This can
also be done using the subprocess module with poll().

 

[dakman]

You may be able to use os.popen()

 

[Jordan]

I think the win32all extension includes the findwindow() fuction, so
you could make a loop that looks for the window name (or class if it
takes that) of the pdf. You can also loop through a list of running
processes looking for whatever the process name is. Note that both of
these have serious loopholes, such as if there is more than one pdf
open.

Cheers,
Jordan