Question

How to wait for a process to terminate before executing another process in a batch file? Let’s say I have a process notepad.exe that I need to kill before executing wordpad.exe. Then, when wordpad.exe is terminated, I need to launch notepad.exe again. How do I do that?

Answer 1

Try something like this…

@ECHO OFF

PSKILL NOTEPAD

START "" "C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories\wordpad.exe"

:LOOP
PSLIST wordpad >nul 2>&1
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 (
  GOTO CONTINUE
) ELSE (
  ECHO Wordpad is still running
  TIMEOUT /T 5
  GOTO LOOP
)

:CONTINUE
NOTEPAD

I used PSLIST and PSEXEC, but you could also use TASKKILL and TASKLIST. The >nul 2>&1 is just there to hide all the output from PSLIST. The SLEEP 5 line is not required, but is just there to restrict how often you check if WordPad is still running.