external file closed

[Jerry]

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