Pausing a command-line build?

[digit]

Is it possible to pause a command-line build?

I'm thinking about something like UNIX signals, where I can just tell the process to wait until I tell it to continue again. These signals would come from the parent process I'm using to launch VisBuildCmd.

Thanks in advance.

[kinook]

You could use a signal file. Use a Wait action in the project to wait for a file to be created/modified, and write to the file in the parent process to signal the build to continue.
http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/Manual/waitaction.htm

[digit]

Thanks for the quick reply. Impressive. :)

This isn't exactly what I'm looking for, unfortunately. I just would like a way to pause the build at an arbitrary point. Doing that with the Wait command would mean putting one after every step, which wouldn't even work very well anyway.

[kinook]

You might be able to use something like this to suspend the build process:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/threads/pausep.aspx
http://www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/processutil/processutil.htm

Or if you call the GUI app from the command-line, you could send keystrokes to it to pause/resume the build (pausing would pause the build when the current step finishes). The default shortcuts for pause and resume are Esc and F7.
http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/Manual/command_linegui.htm

[digit]

I thought about something like the CodeProject app you linked, but was worried about the same things he said. I don't want to risk some sort of deadlock or abnormal behavior in a build.

Sending keystrokes to the GUI app is a possibility, though. Maybe I'll implement that.

Thanks for the (fast) help!