external file closed

[utabintarbo]

Jerry wrote:
> On Oct 17, 12:43 pm, "kilnhead" <bumt... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am opening a file using os.start('myfile.pdf') from python. How can I
> > know when the user has closed the file so I can delete it? Thanks.
>
> I assume you mean os.startfile.  There is no way to do this directly.
> os.startfile simply hands off the call to the OS and doesn't provide
> anything to track anything after that.  Since you won't know what
> program handled the file association, you couldn't watch for an
> instance of that to start up and detect when it exits.  Even if you
> could, it wouldn't be reliable as in the case of PDF's and Adobe
> Acrobat Reader, the user could close the document, but not the
> application, so your script would never delete the file in question.
>
> If anyone can think of a way to do this, it would be interesting to see
> how it's done.
>
> --
> Jerry

os.system('myfile.pdf') will give return code upon closing. This can
also be done using the subprocess module with poll().