Pause windows powershell until Application opens fully

Question

I am trying to automate a few tedious tasks at my work. I do not have admin rights, so I cannot download/install anything. All I can use is Windows PowerShell or other native Windows programs.

Right now I'm running into the problem of getting PowerShell to pause itself until a program opens fully. I am trying to open a program on my local desktop, and have PwerShell sign in for me. I could use a -wait or start-sleep, but these computers are old. Sometimes they take 5 sec to open other times it takes 5 mins.

Is there away way to tell PowerShell to check if a program is fully loaded before continuing to run the script?

PowerShell V1.0 BTW

You have to use native Win32 calls to get the state of another application. That means you'll need to use [PInvoke](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11065026/get-window-state-of-another-process), which, in PowerShell means you need to [create a custom type](http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/2009/01/19/powershell-pinvoke-walkthrough/). I have no idea if PowerShell v1.0 can do any of this. I remember it had significant limitations. — Bacon Bits, Sep 03 '15 at 20:09

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 08 '17 at 06:21

This was something that I was asking of myself just moments ago, and happened to come across your question. I realise that my response is rather late but thought that I would post something up in case if other people stumble across this question of yours. I did some digging around and I thing that the following code snippet may be of use to you:

$appProcess = Start-Process -FilePath "INSERT_PATH_TO_APP_EXE_HERE" -PassThru
$applicationStarted = $False
$stopCheckTime = (Get-Date).AddMinutes(1)

While (!$applicationStarted -and (Get-Date) -lt $stopCheckTime)
{
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 10
    $tempProc = Get-Process -Id $appProcess.Id
    $applicationStarted = $tempProc.MainWindowHandle -ne 0 -and ![string]::IsNullOrWhitespace($tempProc.MainWindowTitle)
}

if ($applicationStarted)
{
    # Do whatever you need to do once the application is launched
}
else
{
    # Log/raise error
}

To explain what is happening, when a user-interface application (e.g. Notepad) is launched, the MainWindowHandle pointer value of the process will be non-zero and typically the MainWindowTitle property of the process will have a string value in it (e.g. Notepad). When I initially launch the application using Start-Process I specify the PassThru flag so that I can immediately get the process ID, which then allows me to periodically check that the application is running.

With the application that I was using this code snippet for, the application takes a bit of time to launch (2 seconds or thereabouts) as it has to establish a connection to a local database during launch, as well as make some HTTP calls before the application is presented to the user. Hence why I have this check in a While loop whereby I'm checking every 10 seconds in a 1 minute period.

Pause windows powershell until Application opens fully

1 Answers1