Question

Is there a simple way to suspend/pause an entire Erlang program without resorting to using OS commands (e.g. sysinternals pssuspend for Windows)?

Ideally I would like to resume the program on return from an external program.

Answer 1

I think the short answer to my question is ‘no’.

You can send a pause message to all processes. However it is difficult to know in what order processes will stop and there could be a relatively large time delay if a lot of processes are used. In the end I did use pssuspend to do this:

In Erlang:

runmyscript() ->
  receive
       updatemodel->
           os:cmd("start myscript.bat"),
...
end.

In myscript.bat

pssuspend werl.exe
mycommands
...
pssuspend -r werl.exe
exit