Start and Stop program

[saj0577]

After looking at compiz-switch/ i decided i wanted to make a simple program that does the following.

Checks to see if a program is running (i.e apache, amsn)
If its running stops it if its not running starts it.

What language would be best to do this and how would i go about doing this. i.e checking if a program is running.

Saj

[nanotube]

After looking at compiz-switch/ i decided i wanted to make a simple program that does the following.

Checks to see if a program is running (i.e apache, amsn)
If its running stops it if its not running starts it.

What language would be best to do this and how would i go about doing this. i.e checking if a program is running.

Saj

seems that this is a good job for a shell script. something along the lines of the code below should do the trick:

if $(ps ax |grep 'yourprogram' |grep -v 'grep'; then
    pkill 'yourprogram'
else
    /path/to/yourprogram &

[ghostdog74]

#!/bin/bash
if [ ! -z "$(pidof program)" ] ;then  
    pkill program
else 
    /path/program &
fi

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Plain killing may work, but the right way to do something like this is to use start_stop_daemon with PIDFILE -- take a look at just about any startup script in /etc/init.d (hal should be a good example).

[saj0577]

Cheers.

Saj