Re: [dwm] mail notification again

Peter Vollmar --> dwm (2008-01-19 21:51:17 +0100):
> Thank you so much Jukka, your script works great. I've tried to simplify
> it to fit my needs, now I have everything in one script. Apart from the
> in.sh with FIFO solution, I have also managed to incorporate your script
> in my .xinitrc in the usual dwm loop. (I didn't know how to get rid of
> the [if $MCK...] clause though, since I don't need the "no" option here,
> but anyhow, it's working...)

Just remove the whole line and the corresponding `fi' command.

> I have noticed that when running with the FIFO option, upon dwm shutdown
> some running programs get killed before they can save their
> configuration (resulting in repeated file corruption in some cases!).

What programs?

> This doesn't seem to happen with the direct loop, although dwm sometimes
> takes about 5-10 seconds to close down all programs (or is it the X
> server?).
> Can you explain this behaviour?

I assume that by "direct loop" you are referring to the status bar
code snippet from the dwm README. If your using something like that,
calling `sleep n' after each call to your output printing commands,
and exit dwm using its quit() function, you'll have to wait up to n
seconds until the X server shuts down, depending on for how long the
current `sleep n' command has already been running. When using the
FIFO approach, the X server shuts down as soon as you tell dwm to quit
(which is the correct behaviour IMHO).

I don't know why this causes corrupted files for you. Maybe your
programs somehow depend on those "up to n seconds", but such a setup
would be broken IMHO because you might quit dwm after `sleep 1' has
terminated but before the next loop iteration has started, thus shutting
down the X server immediately as if you had use the FIFO approach.
You'd probably see the same corruption then.

> By the way, is "dwm -q" the same as "killall dwm" (to use in a shutdown
> script)?

$ dwm -q
usage: dwm [-v]
$ killall dwm
ksh: killall: not found

> Anyway, here's my most recent .xinitrc, running dwm without FIFO, and
> showing uptime and date every 7 seconds and the number of mails calling
> "fetchmail -c" every 280 seconds in the output bar.
>
> --
> xhkeys
> feh --bg-scale /tmp/losung.pnm
> while true; do
>
> : ${DELAY:=40} \
> ${MCK:=yes} \
> ${MCK_INT:=7} # if $MCK != no, run mail check every $(( $MCK_INT * $DELAY )) seconds
>
> main()
> {
> local now loadavg
> local i=0 nmsgs=
>
> # loop forever
> while :; do
> now="$(date +'%a %d %b %R')"
> loadavg="$(uptime | sed 's/.*,//')"
>
> if [ $MCK != 'no' ]; then
> if [ $i -eq 0 ]; then
>
> nmsgs="$(fetchmail -c --sslproto tls | sed 's/(//' | awk '{print $1-$3}')"
> fi
> i=$(( ($i+1) % ${MCK_INT:?} ))
> fi
>
> echo "$loadavg" "$now" "$nmsgs"
> sleep ${DELAY:?}
>
> done
> }
>
> main
> sleep 1
> done | dwm

Hmm, this doesn't make much sense: main() never returns, thus `sleep 1'
never gets executed, and if it did, you really wouldn't need to redefine
main() on every loop iteration. It's quite constant ;-)

I'd suggest you to read about basic shell programming if you want to
learn how to do this correctly...

Cheers, Jukka

-- 
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$ ((RANDOM%6)) || rm -rf ~