browser launcher script stopped working

**zorblek** · February 20th, 2011

I use several different browsers, and I don't have a lot of memory, so I try to only have one open at a time. I wanted web pages to open in whatever browser was open at the time, so I created a shell script and set it as the default browser. It checks to see if any other browsers are running, and if not, it opens the page in Swiftfox (an optimized version of Firefox). This worked for quite a while, but recently it stopped working. Now it opens URLs in Swiftfox regardless of what else is running, and I can't figure out why. As far as I can tell none of the process names have changed, and I haven't edited the script. I'm not very experienced with scripting, so I'd really appreciate any help or insight. Thanks!

The script:

Code:

#! /bin/bash

if pidof swiftfox-bin
then swiftfox $*
else if pidof firefox
then firefox $*
else if pidof google-chrome
then google-chrome $*
else if pidof opera
then opera $*
else swiftfox $*
fi
fi
fi
fi

**tredegar** · February 21st, 2011

Now it opens URLs in Swiftfox regardless of what else is running

Perhaps there is an instance of swiftbox already running?

Check with

Code:

ps -Al | grep swift

Otherwise, debug your script by trying each line, one at a time, from a terminal eg

pidof firefox

(which does not work for me I have to do pidof firefox-bin to get the PID

I'm running 10.04.2

**zorblek** · February 21st, 2011

Well, it turns out that I was wrong on two counts: I missed the firefox issue (I hardly ever use plain firefox, so I never noticed) and at some point the main Chrome process changed from google-chrome to just chrome, and I didn't notice.

Thanks so much for the help! This was a major annoyance while it lasted.