Interprocess Synchronization

All processes protect against the casual exchange of data; however, occasionally two processes may need to communicate with each other. One method that enables one process to communicate with another is called interprocess synchronization.

Because multiple processes can have handles to the same event or mutex object, these objects can be used to accomplish interprocess synchronization. The process that creates an object can use the handle returned by the CreateEvent or CreateMutex function. Other processes can open a handle to the object by using its name in another call to the CreateEvent or CreateMutex function.

Named objects provide a way for processes to share object handles. The name specified by the creating process is limited to the number of characters that are defined by MAX_PATH. It can include any character except the backslash (\) path-separator character. Once a process has created a named event or mutex object, other processes can use the name to call the appropriate function, either CreateEvent or CreateMutex, to open a handle to the object. Name comparison is case-sensitive.

The names of event and mutex objects share the same name space. If you specify a name that is in use by an object of another type when you create an object, the function succeeds, but GetLastError returns ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS. To avoid this error, use unique names and be sure to check function return values for duplicate-name errors.

The following code example shows how to use object names by creating and opening named objects. The first process uses CreateMutex to create the mutex object. Note that the function succeeds even if there is an existing object with the same name.

HANDLE MakeMyMutex (void)
{
  HANDLE hMutex;

  hMutex = CreateMutex (
            NULL,                             // No security attributes
            FALSE,                            // Initially not owned
            TEXT("MutexToProtectDatabase"));  // Name of mutex object

  if (NULL == hMutex)
  {
    // Your code to deal with the error goes here.
  }

  return hMutex;
} // End of MakeMyMutex example code