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copied!<p><strong>Every single running application has a parent application</strong>, which launched it (except for root system process).</p> <p>It is not possible to tell, whenever it is user who directly clicked on application to lauch it or not.</p> <p>Example: take Explorer shell (not Internet Explorer). </p> <ol> <li><p>You can double click on any application to launch it. The parent process will be explorer.exe. </p></li> <li><p>You can right-click on any file and a bunch of context menu extenders will load. Some of them may launch external applications to, say, create a preview of video-file (I saw this, swear!). The parent process will be explorer.exe, but user didn't indended to lauch any application. He just wants to view file's properties. He didn't even know, that applications were lauched!</p></li> </ol> <p>Example: take Total Commander or any other two-panel file managers, which supports plugins for archives.</p> <ol> <li>You can double click on any application to launch it. The parent process will be totalcmd.exe.</li> <li>You may enter archive file and copy (extract) few files from it to your Documents folders. Corresponding plugin may handle extraction by itself or run invisible process to handle all work. All you see is progress bar in Total Commander. But there is a new proces and its parent is totalcmd.exe again.</li> </ol> <p>There are no differences between cases 1 and 2 in both examples.</p> <p>BTW, the definition "started by user" is unclear. You even may say that nothing can happen without user's command. All those background processes in cases #2 were launched because user asked for it. Well, user didn't asked for lauch explicitly, but he asked for operation itself.</p>

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