[Mingw-users] How to write a "proper" Win32 daemon using MinGW?

[Robert L. <bob...@gm...>]

Hello all,

I'd like to know if it is at all possible to write UNIX-like daemons
in a MinGW (non-MSYS) environment. Of course I could just go ahead and
try to cook something that fork()s off and does its thing in the
background, but I'd like to know if it works on Windows just as on
Linux. On startup, the program must check if another instance is
already running, and must abort. Alternatively, when called a second
time with a command-line option, it must cause the existing process to
cleanly terminate.

Since all the program does is a periodic consistency check of a bunch
of files once a minute, writing out the result in another file, it is
trivial to just have a batch file call the program in an infinite
loop. This is what I'll do for the first testing version. Eventually I
would like the thing to run invisibly in the background without
littering the task bar with nonsensical command windows though.

Thanks,
robert