Patent ID: 6601188
Filing Date: 2003-07-29
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
A method of investigating the operation of processes of an application program running on a multitasking operating system of a computer system to determine if any of said processes have stopped for a predetermined exception incident, comprising:identifying to said operating system a plurality of predetermined exceptions to be investigated, wherein the predetermined exceptions are associated with the processes; instructing said operating system to stop one of the processes when that process encounters one of said predetermined exception incidents, wherein if the process has an associated file in a process file system, the process is started with an environment variable set to indicate use of the file and wherein the process is stopped using the file; scanning said computer system periodically for stopped processes; determining whether a stopped process has been identified as having encountered a predetermined exception incident, wherein if the process has the associated file, using the file to determine whether the process encountered the predetermined exception incident; and performing a predetermined action if said stopped process has encountered a predetermined exception incident.