design pattern for determine if an app has shutdown cleanly

what's the best design pattern to check to see if an app has shutdown cleanly(eg. didn't crash)?

It seems creating a lock file in the current directory and deleting the file upon normal shutdown is a goo开发者_Go百科d way, or is it?

are there better ways? The app is in java, so I plan to add a shutdown hook to the instance to delete the lock file. is this a good way?

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Adding a shutdown hook doesn't seem ideal to me, as I'd expect a shutdown hook to still be executed if the application crashed. I'd just make the deletion part of "normal system exit".

But yes, having a file seems pretty reasonable to me. One caveat though - consider what would happen if your application were opened twice or more concurrently. You may want to create a randomly-named file instead of one with a fixed name.