BeagleBone - 2 programs running in parallel - terminal

simply put I got this situation:
Q 1) I have 2 programs (one in C++, one in JavaScript) and I need to run them both at the same time - > I hope to get the answer in form of console command
- is e.g.
./main & ./main
rigt way to do that? The trouble is, I cant close both programs with "CTRL + C" (one is running in the backgroud and cant be even closed with "CTRL + Z")
Q 2) How to communicate between 2 programs running in parallel ? E.G. Is it possible to "put" the JavaScript program into 1 thread under the C++ program?
I am considering to write&read from file (synchronization based on real time), as it is sufficient for my to send/receive 1 byte / minute
(hey, terrible idea, but as long as it works, it is not stupid)
PS
BeagleBone Black with Angstrom
terminal program Putty (multi-Putty is not working)

While developing, just use 2 consoles. When done with development, I assume your 2 apps will run as services. As far as communication, an external file will work, but something like dbus or port communication would probably be better.

Related

Check status of a forked process?

I'm running a process that will take, optimistically, several hours, and in the worst case, probably a couple of days.
I've tried a couple of times to run it and it just never seems to complete (I should add, I didn't write the program, it's just a big dataset). I know my syntax for the command is correct as I use it all the time for smaller data and it works properly (I'll spare you the details as it is obscure for SO and I don't think that relevant to the question).
Consequently, I'd like to leave the program unattended running as a fork with &.
Now, I'm not totally sure whether the process is just grinding to a halt or is running but taking much longer than expected.
Is there any way to check the progress of the process other than ps and top + 1 (to check CPU use).
My only other thought was to get the process to output a logfile and periodically check to see if the logfile has grown in size/content.
As a sidebar, is it necessary to also use nohup with a forked command?
I would use screen for this purpose. see the man for more reference
Brief summary how to use:
screen -S some_session_name - starts a new screen session named session_name
Ctrl + a + d - detach session
screen -r some_session_name returns you to your session

Detect if MATLAB startup.m is running on a worker

A colleague has a MATLAB startup.m file that contains interactive code (it calls the command questdlg to ask him which project directory he wishes to work in).
This works fine for him when running MATLAB directly. However, he also needs to run MATLAB code in parallel, having started up a matlabpool.
When starting up, the workers in the matlabpool are running his startup.m file, getting to the questdlg and then hanging (infinitely, or until Ctrl C).
An easy solution is to just get rid of the interactive code from his startup.m, as it's not really essential.
But is there a way to detect whether this startup.m is being run by a worker starting up - something similar to isdeployed or ismcc? Then he could keep the interactive code that he finds useful, but only execute it when not starting up a worker.
The command getCurrentWorker seemed like it might be what was needed, but I believe that only works during the execution of a task, rather than at startup.
You could use the usejava function to see if the interactive desktop is running, which is probably a good enough approximation unless you frequently use -nodesktop mode.
if usejava('desktop')
questdlg(...);
end
Take a look at labindex and, failing that, labSend and labReceive.
At least for my R2014b,
isempty(getCurrentWorker)
seem to do the job:
>> getCurrentWorker
ans =
[]
>> parfor i=1:2;disp(getCurrentWorker);end
Worker
Host: IMP.OIMRDS
ComputerType: WIN64
ProcessId: 15784
Worker
Host: IMP.OIMRDS
ComputerType: WIN64
ProcessId: 17220

Playing Sound in Perl script

I'm trying to add sound to a Perl script to alert the user that the transaction was OK (user may not be looking at the screen all the time while working). I'd like to stay as portable as possible, as the script runs on Windows and Linux stations.
I can
use Win32::Sound;
Win32::Sound::Play('SystemDefault',SND_ASYNC);
for Windows. But I'm not sure how to call a generic sound on Linux (Gnome). So far, I've come up with
system('paplay /usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alert/sonar.ogg');
But I'm not sure if I can count on that path being available.
So, three questions:
Is there a better way to call a default sound in Gnome
Is that path pretty universal (at least among Debain/Ubuntu flavors)
paplay takes a while to exit after playing a sound, is there a better way to call it?
I'd rather stay away from beeping the system speaker, it sounds awful (this is going to get played a lot) and Ubuntu blacklists the PC Speaker anyway.
Thanks!
A more portable way to get the path to paplay (assuming it's there) might be to use File::Which. Then you could get the path like:
use File::Which;
my $paplay_path = which 'paplay';
And to play the sound asynchronously, you can fork a subprocess:
my $pid = fork;
if ( !$pid ) {
# in the child process
system $paplay_path, '/usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alert/sonar.ogg';
}
# parent proc continues here
Notice also that I've used the multi-argument form of system; doing so avoids the shell and runs the requested program directly. This avoids dangerous bugs (and is more efficient.)

What do I need to read to understand $PATH

I'm new to programming/development and I'm having trouble installing development tools.One of my biggest problems when installing something is understanding the shell or terminal (are they the same thing?) and how it relates to installing tools like uncrustify for example. What do I need to read to understand the shell/terminal and $PATH?
Have you tried Googling?
Environment variable
PATH (variable)
(I think you're getting good advice so far on PATH)
The most generic description of a shell is that is a program that facilitates interaction w programs. Programs facilitate 'communication' with the OS to perform work by the hardware.
There are two modes that you will normally interact with a shell.
a command-line processor, where you type in commands, letter-by-letter, word-by-word until you press the enter key. Then the shell will read what you have typed, validate that it understands the general form of what you have asked for, and then start running the 1 (or more) programs specified in what you have typed.
a batch-script processor. In this case you have assembled all of the commands you want executed into a file, and then thru 1 of several mechanisms, you arrange to have the batch-script run so it will in turn run the commands you have specified and the computer does your work for you. Have you done a Windows .Bat file? same idea, but more powerful.
So, a terminal widow is program that is responsible for a. getting input and b., printing output. When you get to the c-programming that underlies the Unix system, you are talking about a feature of the OS design which are called Standard In and Standard Out. Normal unix commands expect to read instructions from StdIn and print output to StdOut.
Of course, all good programs can get their input from files and write there output to files as well, and most programs will take over the StdIn/Out and process files instead of reading input from the keyboard and/or writing to the screen.
To return to the shell, this program that lets you type while the terminal window is open. There are numerous versions of the shell that you may run into AND have varying levels of features that support a. interactive-mode, b. batch-script mode.
To sum it up, here a diagram of what is involved (very basically) for terminal and shell
(run a) terminal-window (program)
shell-command-prompt (program) (automatically started as subprogram)
1. enter commands one at a time, with input from
a. typed at keyboard (std-in)
b. infile
and output to
a. screen (std-out)
b. outFile
program
calls OS level functions for
a. computation
b. I/O
OR 2.
(run the shell program without a terminal, usually from the cron sub-system)
shell-batch-processor
shell program reads batch-script file, 1 'statement' at a time
validate statements
run program, relying on script or cfg to provide inFile data and
indicate where to put outfile data.
I hope this helps.

how to stop a running script in Matlab [duplicate]

This question already has an answer here:
How to abort a running program in MATLAB?
(1 answer)
Closed 7 years ago.
I write a long running script in Matlab, e.g.
tic;
d = rand(5000);
[a,b,c] = svd(d);
toc;
It seems running forever. Becasue I press F5 in the editor window. So I cannot press C-Break to stop in the Matlab console.
I just want to know how to stop the script. I am current use Task Manager to kill Matlab, which is really silly.
Thanks.
Matlab help says this-
For M-files that run a long time, or that call built-ins or MEX-files that run a long time, Ctrl+C does not always effectively stop execution. Typically, this happens on Microsoft Windows platforms rather than UNIX[1] platforms. If you experience this problem, you can help MATLAB break execution by including a drawnow, pause, or getframe function in your M-file, for example, within a large loop. Note that Ctrl+C might be less responsive if you started MATLAB with the -nodesktop option.
So I don't think any option exist. This happens with many matlab functions that are complex. Either we have to wait or don't use them!.
If ctrl+c doesn't respond right away because your script is too long/complex, hold it.
The break command doesn't run when matlab is executing some of its deeper scripts, and either it won't log a ctrl sequence in the buffer, or it clears the buffer just before or just after it completes those pieces of code. In either case, when matlab returns to execute more of your script, it will recognize that you are holding ctrl+c and terminate.
For longer running programs, I usually try to find a good place to provide a status update and I always accompany that with some measure of time using tic and toc. Depending on what I am doing, I might use run time, segment time, some kind of average, etc...
For really long running programs, I found this to be exceptionally useful
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/16649-send-text-message-to-cell-phone/content/send_text_message.m
but it looks like they have some newer functions for this too.
MATLAB doesn't respond to Ctrl-C while executing a mex implemented function such as svd. Also when MATLAB is allocating big chunk of memory it doesn't respond. A good practice is to always run your functions for small amount of data, and when all test passes run it for actual scale. When time is an issue, you would want to analyze how much time each segment of code runs as well as their rough time complexity.
Consider having multiple matlab sessions. Keep the main session window (the pretty one with all the colours, file manager, command history, workspace, editor etc.) for running stuff that you know will terminate.
Stuff that you are experimenting with, say you are messing with ode suite and you get lots of warnings: matrix singular, because you altered some parameter and didn't predict what would happen, run in a separate session:
dos('matlab -automation -r &')
You can kill that without having to restart the whole of Matlab.
One solution I adopted--for use with java code, but the concept is the same with mexFunctions, just messier--is to return a FutureValue and then loop while FutureValue.finished() or whatever returns true. The actual code executes in another thread/process. Wrapping a try,catch around that and a FutureValue.cancel() in the catch block works for me.
In the case of mex functions, you will need to return somesort of pointer (as an int) that points to a struct/object that has all the data you need (native thread handler, bool for complete etc). In the case of a built in mexFunction, your mexFunction will most likely need to call that mexFunction in the separate thread. Mex functions are just DLLs/shared objects after all.
PseudoCode
FV = mexLongProcessInAnotherThread();
try
while ~mexIsDone(FV);
java.lang.Thread.sleep(100); %pause has a memory leak
drawnow; %allow stdout/err from mex to display in command window
end
catch
mexCancel(FV);
end
Since you mentioned Task Manager, I'll guess you're using Windows. Assuming you're running your script within the editor, if you aren't opposed to quitting the editor at the same time as quitting the running program, the keyboard shortcut to end a process is:
Alt + F4
(By which I mean press the 'Alt' and 'F4' keys on your keyboard simultaneously.)
Alternatively, as mentioned in other answers,
Ctrl + C
should also work, but will not quit the editor.
if you are running your matlab on linux, you can terminate the matlab by command in linux consule.
first you should find the PID number of matlab by this code:
top
then you can use this code to kill matlab:
kill
example:
kill 58056
To add on:
you can insert a time check within a loop with intensive or possible deadlock, ie.
:
section_toc_conditionalBreakOff;
:
where within this section
if (toc > timeRequiredToBreakOff) % time conditional break off
return;
% other options may be:
% 1. display intermediate values with pause;
% 2. exit; % in some cases, extreme : kill/ quit matlab
end

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