Check if a process has crashed

[tofagerl]

I'm having problems with the Carbonite backup app on my mothers laptop. It will crash and use all available CPU untill I manually force close it. Obviously, this is not ideal, and several times I only find out that this has happened after receiving an email from carbonite saying that it hasn't backed up for X days.

So I have to options. One is to have cron close and restart it every X hours, and the other is to check via cron if the process has crashed (it will still be running, so pidof isn't an option) and only then close/restart it.

I'm pretty sure bash doesn't know how to check if an app has crashed, but does AppleScript? How about any other scripting languages? Python?

 

[robbieduncan]

There is no general purpose way to confirm if an app has crashed. Anything that claims to essentially relies on the process responding to some sort of signal within a time period. Failure to do so does not guarantee the process is crashed.

 

[tofagerl]

Which is out, since I have no idea how the process would respond... Maybe I could measure CPU time over a period of ten seconds or something, but that seems like it would have tons of false positives when a backup is actually run.