Bashscripts.org

Hello,

I am trying to write a script that turns off the screensaver for a certain period of time, then come back on. I have had it up and running for a while, but then I decided to refactor it a bit for my family members that are less computer savvy.

I am starting a subshell for the "meat" of the off script



I want to be able to find this sleep command and kill the command. This allows the finishing of the script calling my sson script and then exiting.

I could always do a "ps ux|grep sleep|awk '{print $2}'|xargs kill", but if I happen to any other script with a sleep running that is not associated with sleeping the screesaver, this will kill that one too.

I was hoping to use the $! ability of bash on the subshell and kill that, but is many of you probably already knew, killing the bash doesn't kill the sleep. As I'm typing this, I thought of this:



I do the whole touch and append thing because I would like to keep a log of the pids and kill any that might have been run (or kill all previous before) in case my ssoff script is invoked twice.

Plus, I just want to do an exercise for my own learning on PID tracking.

Is this the way it should be done, or is there a better way of coding it?

With thanks,
Narnie

Hey, that's actually quite good. Very nicely done.

You could always check for the file at the beginning before you do anything else, and rm the file at the end.



Although, I would watch out for two things with this strategy:
1. The script fails before the call to rm, blocking a restart
2. /tmp might be cleaned on a regular (say, nightly) basis

- thobbs

Are you using Ubuntu by any chance? In that case inhibiting the screensaver is as easy as invoking
Just my 2c.