I'm working on a GUI for Windows XP. Everything works great, except when I run an external command through backticks, %x(), IO.popen, etc, I get a DOS window that pops up for a split second. I know this doesn't happen when I've developed on OS X and Linux. Any ideas on how to get rid of it? (Or at least hide it?)
I'm using rubyw 1.8.6 (the "GUI version" of Ruby for Windows) and GTK2 for the interface.
You can use the Win32API module, and call the windows api CreateProcess Function. It ain't pretty.
As mentioned in a comment, I never found a solution to this. In this particular circumstance, the information I needed was actually already stored on the filesystem (so I just read it in as a file). This wasn't immediately obvious before, and isn't likely to come up in all circumstances.
If anyone finds a "true" solution, I would be interested in hearing about it.
Related
Is it's possible to detect inside app from where it was run? From cmd/bash or from GUI? Assume that we are working in graphical mode, not in pure console.
Not really, but sort of. Short answer: better not to try, get the user to tell you via an argument, which you can pre-fill in a shortcut.
Long answer:
In both cases, the program is launched in a similar way: the shell application (whether cmd/bash or Windows explorer/whatever gui launcher linux has) call CreateProcess or ShellExecute on Windows or fork+exec on Linux and the way the user executed it gets lost.
However, the process does have a parent ID which might be useful.... but it isn't reliable either for a few reasons: telling if it is a gui or command line shell isn't easy (best you can do is look at the image name) and the parent might terminate as soon as you launch, so there'd be no parent! (Linux gui apps often fork themselves to detach from the terminal. Of course, if you do this you'd probably know, but if you use a library it might happen without you realizing it.)
Well, the fact that I'm going off on parenthetical asides after every sentence shows how unreliable and complicate that is. If you want to try though, looking at your parent process ID before doing any fork/detaching might be helpful.
BTW looking for a parent console isn't very helpful: a Windows GUI subsystem program won't attach to the parent console even if one exists and a Linux GUI program may attach to the controlling tty of the X window manager.
What I'd actually recommend though is passing an argument to your function to tell it how it got started. When you create the GUI shortcut, make it automatically pass the "started by gui" argument to you. Then you can check args for it and react accordingly.
It still isn't perfect, but it is fairly easy to implement and probably good enough - gui launchers would probably use a shortcut anyway and you can pass arguments through them, so the user doesn't need to know about how it is implemented.
Or you could install two programs, one which is convenient from the command line and one which is optimized for the gui environment.
But I think that's the best you can do.
So honestly, I don't really 'get' what's going on here, I mean, can I open the regular windows cmd.exe and use node from there? Or does it have to be from the node.js command window? Can I move files around on my system using the node.js command window? And yes, I currently can't figure out how to get it to interpret what i write, although it was working perfect before, but now I cant seem to escape from '...' every line, with no response.
Thanks
I use Node on *nix, so I'm not sure if it's different in Windows. But on *nix systems, the ellipses means it's waiting on you to finish a code block or the like. You should be able to hit CTRL+C (again, might be different in Windows) to cancel out of the edit you're in or CTRL+Z to kill the REPL entirely.
I am trying to tidy up a process that uses multiple system calls from inside a ruby script executed using rubyw.exe (1.8.7).
As far as I can understand the main reason for rubyw.exe is that it doesn't pop up a command prompt to distract the user. However it appears that the system calls from within that process still do generate these popups which is very distracting for the users of this process script.
Does anyone know how to do this?
There are lots of questions similar to this on SO but none which quite answers this, if I was using python this questions/answer would help (http://code.activestate.com/lists/python-list/46042/) but so far my searching hasn't found a way to accomplish this with ruby.
UPDATE: There is this thread here Hiding curl Window on Windows which is close but the only working solution there doesn't also allow you to get the standard output.
I ended up going with the win32-open3 gem. Because fork isn't implemented on windows systems you can't use the built in open3 and you'll need to do a
gem install win32-open3
However this comes with flags that you can pass to the call method, in particular
There are a couple of differences in the Windows version for open3
(which
also apply to Open4.popen4) - the mode flag and the show flag. For the
mode, you can specify either 't' (text, the default) or 'b' (binary) as a
second argument. For the show flag, you can specify either true or false,
which will show the console window, or not, depending on the value you
pass. The default is false.
Users of this particular script are no longer bombarded with 15 cmd windows that constantly steal focus, so .... win?
I have a Python program that is mostly complete, and there is one thing that I'd like to change, which may or may not be possible.
This program uses PyQT to display a GUI and I have it pretty much pinned up so I was wondering if I can make Python not open up a termianl when I open the program.
I am using Windows XP right now, but the machines it will run on will be Windows 7. I generally work with Linux, so I'm not terribly familiar with Windows.
If the terminal has to be there, it's no big deal, but I feel like it's extraneous at this point.
Thanks!
Use the python extension .pyw.
E.g program.pyw
This causes your program to be run with pythonw.exe instead of python.exe which suppresses the terminal.
I need to open an url from my application, on both linux and windows and i want to avoid replacing an existing page on an open browser.
How do i call for it to open?
I know i can use
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("http://mysite.com");
which should also work under linux, but this will replace any page shown on an already open browser window.
i found this article ( thx to Nissan Fan):
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("http://mysite.com");
but this only works for windows and i need a solution that will work on both systems.
I think this is what you want:
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start ("xdg-open http://mysite.com");
This will only work on linux, but should work for all linux desktops. Like grombeestje said, you should probably implement it separately for Windows and linux.
i would suggest to check on what OS the app is running, and then implement it for each OS separately.
After searching through the Banshee source code I see that they use Gnome.Url.Show() (In gnome-sharp) to open the users default browser.
If that isn't possible for whatever reason, a couple of other ideas come to mind.
If the user is running Gnome there should be a program called "gnome-open" that should do the trick.
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("gnome-open http://mysite.com");
And if that doesn't work I know that (at least) all Debian-based systems come with a script called sensible-browser.
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("sensible-browser http://mysite.com");