[SOLVED] Turning off Compiz for Games Script

[dexter.deepak]

So, I tried...

a=`ps -fp $$ |tail -1 | awk '{print $3}'`
kill $a

and it didn't work... I even ran it in a script by itself... and I tried killall instead of kill. But that was pretty clever... I wouldn't have thought about the id.

However I tried running a script that just slept for 3 second and did a killall gnome-terminal... it worked. Here is the final script if anyone wants to use it...

#!/bin/bash

read -p "What game would you like to play?" GAME
metacity --replace &
sleep 3
$GAME
compiz --replace &
sleep 3
killall gnome-terminal

your "solution" script has a BIG flaw, when you issue :

killall gnome-terminal

it will kill ALL the gnome-terminals you are currently running...and i dont think you would want this.
thats why i used ppid, so that only the present terminal is closed.
to make things more complex, i have to use the pppid now, ie, the pid of the command's (to find the pid) parent 's (this shell script) parent (the terminal).
so here is the final code :

#!/bin/bash
read -p "What game would you like to play?" GAME
metacity --replace &
$GAME
compiz --replace &
a=`ps -fp $$ |tail -1 | awk '{print $3}'`
b=`ps -fp $a | tail -1| awk '{print $3}'`
kill $b
exit

one more thing about your script...the exit status of your script is 1 - and this technically means that your script isnt yet perfect.
i am also keen to know what purpose does 'sleep' solve for you ??

[soxs]

one more thing about your script...the exit status of your script is 1 - and this technically means that your script isnt yet perfect.
i am also keen to know what purpose does 'sleep' solve for you ??

who cares? as long this script will stay a single peace of "art", it doesn't matter at all. (At least I think so)
Edit: I have RadeonHD 3870 factory OC

[dexter.deepak]

who cares? as long this script will stay a single peace of "art", it doesn't matter at all. (At least I think so)

it was a mere suggestion, if he wants to reuse this script in a bigger application someday

[soxs]

it was a mere suggestion, if he wants to reuse this script in a bigger application someday

well, in that case, I suggest him to use python or C/C++, whereas he could implement the functions in the peding language and not nasty shellscript^^

[anotherdisciple]

That's my next goal... learn python.... I'll try out that last code tonight.

[anotherdisciple]

your "solution" script has a BIG flaw, when you issue :

killall gnome-terminal

it will kill ALL the gnome-terminals you are currently running...and i dont think you would want this.
thats why i used ppid, so that only the present terminal is closed.
to make things more complex, i have to use the pppid now, ie, the pid of the command's (to find the pid) parent 's (this shell script) parent (the terminal).
so here is the final code :

#!/bin/bash
read -p "What game would you like to play?" GAME
metacity --replace &
$GAME
compiz --replace &
a=`ps -fp $$ |tail -1 | awk '{print $3}'`
b=`ps -fp $a | tail -1| awk '{print $3}'`
kill $b
exit

one more thing about your script...the exit status of your script is 1 - and this technically means that your script isnt yet perfect.
i am also keen to know what purpose does 'sleep' solve for you ??

Well.. I'm not sure that killing all of the gnome-terminals would be a problem in this case... I never have more than one terminal open anyways.... plus this script is being used when I am running a game... so I wouldn't be doing anything in the terminal anyways.

But for the sake of learning... I am going to try it some other ways. Can you explain to me what $a and $b do exactly? I know it has something to do with finding the pppid... that's about all I know.

What does an exit status of 1 mean?... and how do you know that it has that?

[dexter.deepak]

Well.. I'm not sure that killing all of the gnome-terminals would be a problem in this case... I never have more than one terminal open anyways.... plus this script is being used when I am running a game... so I wouldn't be doing anything in the terminal anyways.

..and i thought you were doing this all for your friend

What does an exit status of 1 mean?

i am sorry for this..i actually tested your script in geany, and since there was no gnome-terminal there, i got an exit 1 status.

Can you explain to me what $a and $b do exactly?

$a gets the ppid of the command to calculate the ppid ...in our case the parent of the command (ps -fp...) is the shell-script itself.
$b gets the parent of the shell-script..that is the terminal which invoked it.

[anotherdisciple]

HAHA! Actually, I'm not much of a gamer... and my friend is not much of a terminal user... so it works both ways... I will probably use it since I spent all this time trying to figure it out, but it's mostly to make it easier on him... since he isn't very familiar with the command line.'

About the $a and $b stuff... wow... I'm going to whip out my "Linux in a nutshell" and try to see how you came to that command... haha... it's a long and complicated one... I just want to know what it is doing to find that number... awk sounds familiar... not sure where I've used it before... hmmm... I'll get back to you about all this...

[anotherdisciple]

ps= Report on active processes
-fr= Forest, Running Processes
$$= I have no clue (print all of the information?)
tail -1= print only the last line
awk = text based data
print $3- print the third section of this data

So, it says:

Give me a full listing of all the running processes, filter it to only display the last line of those processes, and print only the data in the third section... which represents the id... but this is a bash script... and we want to close the terminal running that bash script... so we do it all over again... but sorting out what id is the parent of that particular bash script.

Am I close?

[anotherdisciple]

I tried this:

#!/bin/bash
read -p "What game would you like to play?" GAME
metacity --replace &
sleep 3
$GAME
compiz --replace &
sleep 3
a=`ps -fp $$ |tail -1 | awk '{print $3}'`
b=`ps -fp $a | tail -1| awk '{print $3}'`
kill $b

... and yes, the sleep 3 after compiz --replace & is necessary. Without it... the terminal closes before it gets a chance to switch to compiz.... weird eh?

The good news is that your script works... the bad news.... well.. it does the same thing as killall gnome-terminal! I opened a few gnome-terminals just to test it.... it killed all of them... not just the one I ran the script in. Any more ideas on how to sort it even further?