Automatically restart Firefox if closed

[chipperuga]

For a kiosk scenario, I run this script to close & restart Firefox when the screensaver is activated (the monitor also goes to sleep).

I want to run a loop that, if Firefox is closed, it will automatically re-open. Is there a way to use dbus-monitor to accomplish this?


#!/usr/bin/perl
my $cmd = "dbus-monitor --session \"type='signal',interface='org.gnome.ScreenSaver', member='ActiveChanged'\"";

open (IN, "$cmd |");

while (<IN>)
{
if (m/^\s+boolean true/)
{
system("pkill -9 firefox");
system("/usr/bin/firefox &");
system("xset dpms force off");
}
elsif (m/^\s+boolean false/)
{
#when not idle
#system("/usr/bin/firefox &");
}
}

[TheSqueak]

#!/bin/bash

while true
do
if [ ! `pgrep firefox-bin` ] ; then
/usr/bin/firefox
fi
sleep 5
done

Something like that could work

[chipperuga]

TheSqueak,

Works perfect--thanks! How resource intensive will this script be? The kiosks we have are old, but run Ubuntu like a champ. I don't want to bog them down by constantly grep'ing for Firefox.

I'd like the script to do: If Firefox closes, restart Firefox.

...as opposed to "check if Firefox is running. If it's not, open Firefox."

Think it's possible? Hope I explained it right.

Chip

[TheSqueak]

time pgrep firefox-bin
28376

real 0m0.009s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.008s

It doesn't take much CPU time to check, so it shouldn't be that resource intensive.

Somebody with more programming knowledge than me might be able to tell you if there's a way of catching firefox closing rather than checking that it's running, but I don't know how myself, sorry.

[basejumper9]

Some minor changes I made as its faster to check a file:


#!/bin/bash

while true
do
if [ ! -h /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/689o3rsb.default/lock ]; then
DISPLAY=:0 firefox
fi
sleep 5
done

You will have to substitute in your own username and profile.

Firefox creates a symbolic link to 127.0.0.1:[pid] and deletes this on clean shutdowns. I haven't checked against crashing and such so the grep option might be more flexible.