Hello
i have been working on a shutdown script,
http://www.happytrees.org/main/main-...bit/bed_pl.txt,
but i want the script to send a 'warning' kill signal to all programs, a minute before shutdown. The idea is, if I have a document open and unsaved in openoffice, it would cause office to ask is i wanted to save before exiting

Also i would want it to close prograns properly, so there is no file damage.

I can figure out the right kill signals

man kill: kill signals
<pre>
TERM 15 exit
USR1 exit
USR2 exit
VTALRM exit
STKFLT exit may not be implemented
PWR ignore may exit on some systems
WINCH ignore
CHLD ignore
URG ignore
TSTP stop may interact with the shell
TTIN stop may interact with the shell
TTOU stop may interact with the shell
STOP stop this signal may not be blocked
CONT restart continue if stopped, otherwise ignore
ABRT 6 core
FPE 8 core
ILL 4 core
QUIT 3 core
SEGV 11 core
TRAP 5 core
SYS core may not be implemented
EMT core may not be implemented
BUS core core dump may fail
XCPU core core dump may fail
XFSZ core core dump may fail
</pre>

thanks,
Jeff
http://en.howto.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

How would that work exactly? Unless openoffice has this functionality built in, then it's not going to work. Programs cannot magically respond to signals any way you like. USR1 and USR2 are "user" signals, you might be able to configure openoffice to respond to those, or you might not. It's application dependent.

Programs will generally exit cleanly when they receive a SIGTERM. They might or might not save unmodified work. You might be able to configure them to auto-save, you might not. What you are asking is completely application depedent. There is no globally applicable behaviour. Why don't you just save your work and close your apps before shutting down? You lazy or what?

I was under the impresion that my window manager, icewm, sent a kill signal to my program when i click the [x] to close. I can also right-click 'close' on my taskbar or use my window list and click close. These all result in ''the document xxxxx has been modified, do you wish to save, for OOfice. This should also occur in Seamonkey with unfinish email drafts, etc......

am i wrong?
Jeff

http://en.howto.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

I believe this is implemented through Extended Window Manager Hints. A command line tool to the EMWH calls is wmctrl. You could
for instance do something like this to find the OpenOffice.org windows and ask them to gracefully quit:

wmctrl -l|grep OpenOffice.org|cut -d' ' -f 1|xargs wmctrl -i -c

No, as demian says, this is done via window manager hints. The wm sends a WM_DELETE_WINDOW client message to the app. This has nothing to do with the system signals.