Question: Application Timer

[CptMurphy]

Hello all, I'm looking for a program that will close an application after a certain amount of time has passed. For example, if a user is using a program for ~25mins, after 30mins, the application closes on him/her. It doesn't really matter if the user is notified or not. I'm mainly looking at controlling the amount of time a users spends playin an online game. I found one called CloseApp but that's shareware. I'd like a freeware one if any of you know of one. I've also heard about creating a batch file stating that a program should close. The only problem with this though, is that there'd be no way of starting a timer as soon as the user starts the game. Any help is appreciated.

[LLXX]

Windows has killtask and at commands, if you do a little more research you should be able to come up with a way of using those.

[ripken204]

well i created an autoit3 program back when i had a crappy laptop. when i would run the sims 2, the program would kill explorer.exe, and when i exited the sims 2, explorer.exe would come back on...

[Aegis]

@echo off
set /a %time:~3,2%+30 > tempfile
for /f %%i in (tempfile) do set closetime=%%i
start calc.exe
:loop
if %time:~3,2%==%closetime% taskkill /f /im calc.exe
goto loop

There's a bug in the loop code somewhere. Once when you can actually find it (I couldn't ) and fix it, this batch file should close calc.exe after running for 30 minutes.

[CptMurphy]

Thanks all, I really appreciate it. Special thanks to Aeigis, Ima work the code now. Thanks man.

@echo off
set /a %time:~3,2%+30 > tempfile
for /f %%i in (tempfile) do set closetime=%%i
start calc.exe
:loop
if %time:~3,2%==%closetime% taskkill /f /im calc.exe
goto loop

There's a bug in the loop code somewhere. Once when you can actually find it (I couldn't ) and fix it, this batch file should close calc.exe after running for 30 minutes.

[EDIT]

All right, I decided to use LLXX's method since it's simpler. I just created a batch file with this code

@echo off
taskkill /IM dfbhd.exe /F
taskkill /IM dfbhdlc.exe /F

From here, I scheduled the task to run every 2 hours, every day, for 2 hours and 10 minutes. This should suffice it. Thanks to all who helped me. BTW, the "at" command is actually not very usefull. I just used the task scheduler.

Edited August 31, 2006 by CptMurphy