In Start Script when Gnome Starts Up it was asked how to automatically start a script on gnome login. But how to automatically stop a long running script on logout, that was started on login? In my case there are two processes when I login twice. Interestingly the process started first does not reside under gnome-session anymore.
I would wrap the binary that gets executed in a simple bash script that saves the pid of the started process in a temporary file. If this file already exists it skips the start of the application. Since the file is saved in the /tmp directory everything gets deleted once you restart your computer.
#!/bin/bash
binary="git-cola"
temp_file="/tmp/my_${binary}_instance.pid"
if [[ -f ${temp_file} ]]
then
echo "PID exists"
else
exec ${binary} &
echo $! > ${temp_file}
fi
With a little more effort you can check if the pid of the process is still running and restart it on the login again (for example if the process crashed or the other user closed it).
I actually don't use Gnome, so I can't tell you if there is a more elegant way to kill the process. Like a logout hook. But once you got the pid of the process saved you can kill it with kill -9 PID. (See man kill for more gentle ways to end the process).
This might not be the solution to stop the process. But to prevent it starting twice.
Related
What I usually do is pause my script, run it in the background and then disown it like
./script
^Z
bg
disown
However, I would like to be able to cancel my script at any time. If I have a script that runs indefinitely, I would like to be able to cancel it after a few hours or a day or whenever I feel like cancelling it.
Since you are having a bit of trouble following along, let's see if we can keep it simple for you. (this presumes you can write to /tmp, change as required). Let's start your script in the background and create a PID file containing the PID of its process.
$ ./script & echo $! > /tmp/scriptPID
You can check the contents of /tmp/scriptPID
$ cat /tmp/scriptPID
######
Where ###### is the PID number of the running ./script process. You can further confirm with pidof script (which will return the same ######). You can use ps aux | grep script to view the number as well.
When you are ready to kill the ./script process, you simply pass the number (e.g. ######) to kill. You can do that directly with:
$ kill $(</tmp/scriptPID)
(or with the other methods listed in my comment)
You can add rm /tmp/scriptPID to remove the pid file after killing the process.
Look things over and let me know if you have any further questions.
Ive got a script that takes a quite a long time to run, as it has to handle many thousands of files. I want to make this script as fool proof as possible. To this end, I want to check if the user ran the script using nohup and '&'. E.x.
me#myHost:/home/me/bin $ nohup doAlotOfStuff.sh &. I want to make 100% sure the script was run with nohup and '&', because its a very painful recovery process if the script dies in the middle for whatever reason.
How can I check those two key paramaters inside the script itself? and if they are missing, how can I stop the script before it gets any farther, and complain to the user that they ran the script wrong? Better yet, is there way I can force the script to run in nohup &?
Edit: the server enviornment is AIX 7.1
The ps utility can get the process state. The process state code will contain the character + when running in foreground. Absence of + means code is running in background.
However, it will be hard to tell whether the background script was invoked using nohup. It's also almost impossible to rely on the presence of nohup.out as output can be redirected by user elsewhere at will.
There are 2 ways to accomplish what you want to do. Either bail out and warn the user or automatically restart the script in background.
#!/bin/bash
local mypid=$$
if [[ $(ps -o stat= -p $mypid) =~ "+" ]]; then
echo Running in foreground.
exec nohup $0 "$#" &
exit
fi
# the rest of the script
...
In this code, if the process has a state code +, it will print a warning then restart the process in background. If the process was started in the background, it will just proceed to the rest of the code.
If you prefer to bailout and just warn the user, you can remove the exec line. Note that the exit is not needed after exec. I left it there just in case you choose to remove the exec line.
One good way to find if a script is logging to nohup, is to first check that the nohup.out exists, and then to echo to it and ensure that you can read it there. For example:
echo "complextag"
if ( $(cat nohup.out | grep "complextag" ) != "complextag" );then
# various commands complaining to the user, then exiting
fi
This works because if the script's stdout is going to nohup.out, where they should be going (or whatever out file you specified), then when you echo that phrase, it should be appended to the file nohup.out. If it doesn't appear there, then the script was nut run using nohup and you can scold them, perhaps by using a wall command on a temporary broadcast file. (if you want me to elaborate on that I can).
As for being run in the background, if it's not running you should know by checking nohup.
I looking to have a script, inside a .app (using Platypus or something) that can check a running process with something like pgrep and handle the output by running the process if it isn't already running but killing it if it is (pkill or something).
The kill would need to stop the process that the script started first time round plus the app that it ran from in the first place.
I know this isn't right but something like this:
#!/bin/bash
if pgrep 'process' &> /dev/null;
then 'command';
else pkill "command,app" || true;
fi
I want a way to write a daemon in a shell script, which runs another application in a loop, restarting it if it dies.
When run using ./myscript.sh from an SSH session, it shall launch a new instance of the daemon, except if the daemon is already running.
When the SSH session ends, the daemon shall persist.
There shall be a parameter (./myscript -stop) that kills any existing daemon.
(Notes on edit - The original question specified that nohup and similar tools may not be used. This artificial requirement was an "XY question", and the accepted answer in fact uses all the tools the OP claimed were not possible to use.)
Based on clarifications in comments, what you actually want is a daemon process that keeps a child running, relaunching it whenever it exits. You want a way to type "./myscript.sh" in an ssh session and have the daemon started.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
PIDFILE=~/.mydaemon.pid
if [ x"$1" = x-daemon ]; then
if test -f "$PIDFILE"; then exit; fi
echo $$ > "$PIDFILE"
trap "rm '$PIDFILE'" EXIT SIGTERM
while true; do
#launch your app here
/usr/bin/server-or-whatever &
wait # needed for trap to work
done
elif [ x"$1" = x-stop ]; then
kill `cat "$PIDFILE"`
else
nohup "$0" -daemon
fi
Run the script: it will launch the daemon process for you with nohup. The daemon process is a loop that watches for the child to exit, and relaunches it when it does.
To control the daemon, there's a -stop argument the script can take that will kill the daemon. Look at examples in your system's init scripts for more complete examples with better error checking.
The pid of the most recently "backgrounded" process is stored in $!
$ cat &
[1] 7057
$ echo $!
7057
I am unaware of a fork command in bash. Are you sure bash is the right tool for this job?
I wanted to know why i am seeing a different behaviour in the background process in Bash shell
Case 1: Logged in to Unix server using Putty(SSH)
By default it uses csh shell
I changed to bash shell
typed sleep 2000 &
press enter
It gave me the job number. Now i killed my session by clicking the x in the putty window
Now open another session and tried to lookup the process..the process died.
Case 2:Case 1: Logged in to Unix server using Putty(SSH)
By default it uses csh shell
I changed to bash shell
vi mysleep.sh
sleep 2000 & Saved mysleep.sh
./mysleep.sh
Diff here is..instead of executing the sleep command directly i am storing the sleep command in a file and executing the file.
Now i killed my session by clicking the x in the putty window
Now open another session and tried to lookup the process..the process is still there
Not sure why this is happening. I thought i need to do disown in bash to run the process even after logging out.
One diff i see in the parent process id..In the second case..the parent process id for the sleep 2000 becomes 1. Looks like as soon as process for mysleep.sh died the kernel assigned the parent process to 1.
The difference here is indeed the intervening process.
When you close the terminal window, a HUP signal (related to "nohup" as an0nymo0usc0ward mentioned) is sent to the processes running in it. The default action on receiving HUP is to die - from the signal(3) manpage,
No Name Default Action Description
1 SIGHUP terminate process terminal line hangup
In your first example, the sleep process directly receives this HUP signal and dies because it isn't set to do anything else. (Some processes catch HUP and use it to perform some action, e.g. reread some configuration files)
In the second example, the shell process running your shell script has already died, so the sleep process never gets the signal. In UNIX, every process must have a parent process due to the internals of how the wait(2) family of calls works and indeed processes in general. So when the parent process dies, the kernel gives it to init (pid 1, as you note) as a foster child.
Orphan process (on wikipedia) has some more information available about it, also see Zombie process for some additional technical details.
Already running process?
^z
bg
disown %<jobid>
New process/script (on local machine's console)?
nohup script.sh &
New process/script (on remote machine's console)?
Depending on your need,
there are two options [ there will be more ;-) ]
ssh remotehost 'nohup /path/to/script.sh </dev/null > nohup.out 2>&1 &'
OR
use 'screen'
Try "nohup cmd args..."
Steven's answer is correct, but I'd like to highlight the tricky part here again:
=> Using a bash script that just executes sleep in the background
The effect of this is that the "script" exits almost immediately (since it's done all its commands). However, it did create a child process (sleep) during its lifetime. The effect of this is that:
The "script" cannot be the parent anymore, and sleep is orphaned to init (which shows nicely in a pstree)
The bash shell where you started the script from has no underlying jobs anymore
Note that this stuff all happens when you executed the script, and has nothing to do with any ssh logout/putty closing.
When you then finally close your putty session, bash receives a "SIGHUP", but doesn't forward it to any other process (since there are no jobs left)
In the other case, bash did still have a job left, which it then sent the SIGHUP to, causing it to end (as you noticed)
Hope this helps