[AG-TECH] New Gentner Software

Bill Nickless nickless at mcs.anl.gov
Mon Jul 23 11:24:40 CDT 2001


At 10:50 AM 7/23/2001 -0500, Robert Olson wrote:
>NOte that both Gware and APware will consume 100% cpu even in an idle 
>state. We've not tested yet to see if this has a bad effect on other 
>things happening on the display box, but it seems it can't be good. 
>Current thinking is to perhaps move to Win2k on the control machine, so we 
>can run other network services there as well.

The good news about Windows 2000 is that you can set the process priority 
of an application at start time.  I've had very good success running things 
like MP3 encoders at LOW (IDLE) priority and continuing to do other things 
on the system.

This should work really well on a display machine with two 
processors.  Last I heard, vic wasn't multithreaded so could only saturate 
one processor.

Here are the details on the start command:

C:\>start /?
Starts a separate window to run a specified program or command.

START ["title"] [/Dpath] [/I] [/MIN] [/MAX] [/SEPARATE | /SHARED]
       [/LOW | /NORMAL | /HIGH | /REALTIME | /ABOVENORMAL | /BELOWNORMAL]
       [/WAIT] [/B] [command/program]
       [parameters]

     "title"     Title to display in  window title bar.
     path        Starting directory
     B           Start application without creating a new window. The
                 application has ^C handling ignored. Unless the application
                 enables ^C processing, ^Break is the only way to interrupt
                 the application
     I           The new environment will be the original environment passed
                 to the cmd.exe and not the current environment.
     MIN         Start window minimized
     MAX         Start window maximized
     SEPARATE    Start 16-bit Windows program in separate memory space
     SHARED      Start 16-bit Windows program in shared memory space
     LOW         Start application in the IDLE priority class
     NORMAL      Start application in the NORMAL priority class
     HIGH        Start application in the HIGH priority class
     REALTIME    Start application in the REALTIME priority class
     ABOVENORMAL Start application in the ABOVENORMAL priority class
     BELOWNORMAL Start application in the BELOWNORMAL priority class
     WAIT        Start application and wait for it to terminate
     command/program
                 If it is an internal cmd command or a batch file then
                 the command processor is run with the /K switch to cmd.exe.
                 This means that the window will remain after the command
                 has been run.

                 If it is not an internal cmd command or batch file then
                 it is a program and will run as either a windowed application
                 or a console application.

     parameters  These are the parameters passed to the command/program


If Command Extensions are enabled, external command invocation
through the command line or the START command changes as follows:

non-executable files may be invoked through their file association just
     by typing the name of the file as a command.  (e.g.  WORD.DOC would
     launch the application associated with the .DOC file extension).
     See the ASSOC and FTYPE commands for how to create these
     associations from within a command script.

When executing an application that is a 32-bit GUI application, CMD.EXE
     does not wait for the application to terminate before returning to
     the command prompt.  This new behavior does NOT occur if executing
     within a command script.

When executing a command line whose first token is the string "CMD "
     without an extension or path qualifier, then "CMD" is replaced with
     the value of the COMSPEC variable.  This prevents picking up CMD.EXE
     from the current directory.

When executing a command line whose first token does NOT contain an
     extension, then CMD.EXE uses the value of the PATHEXT
     environment variable to determine which extensions to look for
     and in what order.  The default value for the PATHEXT variable
     is:

         .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD

     Notice the syntax is the same as the PATH variable, with
     semicolons separating the different elements.

When searching for an executable, if there is no match on any extension,
then looks to see if the name matches a directory name.  If it does, the
START command launches the Explorer on that path.  If done from the
command line, it is the equivalent to doing a CD /D to that path.


===
Bill Nickless    http://www.mcs.anl.gov/people/nickless      +1 630 252 7390
PGP:0E 0F 16 80 C5 B1 69 52 E1 44 1A A5 0E 1B 74 F7     nickless at mcs.anl.gov




More information about the ag-tech mailing list