C++ Pause External Program

Question

Is it possible by any means to brute force momentally pause the execution of an external program? Or something that archieves a similar effect.

I've seen this beforce, a 3rd party software that once came with my Asus laptop, however Im courious on how they managed it.

Answer 1

I don't know about bruteforce, but you can probably just set a debug break in a program and that would pause it.

Answer 2

You can send signals to process. Depending on your operating system, they mean different things. A program which catches a signal may terminate, sleep or continue.

Here is a manual about signals: http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/node24.html

In short:

Use kill (dont be scared, the functions is just called kill and wont terminate anything on its own) to send a signal to a known process id. You can get process ids in linux with ps aux in terminal. This Linux signal looks promising for you:

SIGCONT 19 /* continue a stopped process */

int kill(int pid, int signal) 

• a system call that send a signal to a process, pid. If pid is greater than zero, the signal is sent to the process whose process ID is equal to pid. If pid is 0, the signal is sent to all processes, except system processes.

I don't know much about Windows SIGNAL Codes, but it should work similar. Don't know if they are handling the signal codes different then Linux.

There is also: signal (int number, functionPointer) to call a function, if your programm gets a specific signal.