How to pause Applescript when another process is not responding to system events?

What specifically are you trying to do? The "not responding" state is not a process state, but rather the process has stopped communicating with the system and gets labeled as not responding when the event queue starts backing up. There isn't really an available property to check, although you might try periodically sending a with timeout statement to the application and catch any error - the script will wait until either the application responds or the statement times out (error).

I don't think that the beach ball is so much "reported back to the GUI" as the system (window server, event manager, whatever) just changes the cursor. Note that the busy cursor indicates that the application under it is not responding - it can still be running, it just isn't currently responding to system events.

The Activity Monitor does show an application not responding, but shell utilities such as ps don't appear to have that particular item. As far as I know there isn't anything that would be exposed to an AppleScript, so without seeing exactly what you are trying to do, periodically sending a message (with a timeout as needed) to the application and trapping an error when it doesn't respond might be the way to go.

Sorry - when you use a tell statement you are sending a message (Apple Event) to the application for it to do something. The following snippet just tries to activate the application, but basically it repeats forever until the first tell statement succeeds:

repeat -- forever
  try
    with timeout of 10 seconds
      tell application "TextEdit" to activate -- or whatever
      exit repeat -- success
    end timeout
  on error errmess number errnum -- do whatever on timeout/error
    if errnum = -1712 then
      log "timeout error"
    else
      log errmess & space & errnum
    end if
  end try
end repeat

tell application "TextEdit" to quit -- or whatever
beep 2 -- continue

Hello

Some years ago I've written a command line programme to check unresponsiveness of specified process id. It uses undocumented API of window server. C source code is as follows. Tested to work under 10.5.8. nda 10.6.8. Not sure about later versions.

Regards,

H

/* file main.c function check whether the application with the give process id is responding or not and print 1 if unresponsive, 0 otherwise. compile gcc -std=c99 -framework ApplicationServices -o unresponsive main.c usage e.g. ./unresponsive 354 */ #include <ApplicationServices/ApplicationServices.h> #include <libgen.h> // basename typedef int CGSConnectionID; extern bool CGSEventIsAppUnresponsive(CGSConnectionID cid, const ProcessSerialNumber *psn); extern CGSConnectionID _CGSDefaultConnection(void); int main (int argc, char * argv[]) { if ( argc != 2 ) { fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s pid\n", basename(argv[0])); return 1; } OSStatus err; ProcessSerialNumber psn; pid_t pid = (pid_t) atoi(argv[1]); err = GetProcessForPID(pid, &psn); if ( err ) { fprintf(stderr, "Failed to get PSN for pid %d: error = %d\n", pid, err); return 2; } CGSConnectionID cid = _CGSDefaultConnection(); bool b = CGSEventIsAppUnresponsive(cid, &psn); fprintf(stdout, "%d\n", b ? 1 : 0); return 0; }

Here's a sample code showing how to use it in AppleScript.

tell application "System Events" set pid to process "Adobe Flash Player Install Manager"'s unix id end tell pause_until_responsive(pid) display dialog "Done" on pause_until_responsive(pid) repeat until (do shell script "/usr/local/bin/unresponsive " & pid) = "0" delay 0.5 end repeat end pause_until_responsive

* The command line programme is assumed to be located at /usr/local/bin/unresponsive.

Good luck,

H