Run a Command After Closing Firefox

SweetLou · 12-09-2011, 01:48 PM

I am creating a couple of scripts that will take Firefox's Bookmarks and place them in XFCE's menu. I've pretty much figured that part out, just a couple of tweaks need to be done.

What I want to happen is when Firefox closes that my scripts will run. Or I just thought of this, maybe if Firefox's bookmarks has been changed. But, I have no idea on how to do this.

Could a bash or Python script be used to open Firefox and somehow wait until Firefox closes to run the bookmark updater script? Or even better, only run when Firefox's sqlite bookmarks' table has changed.

Any other ideas?

corp769 · 12-09-2011, 03:27 PM

The easiest way is the following:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
firefox && command

"command" will execute after the firefox process finishes normally. Note that if firefox crashes, or an error is generated, "command" will not run, due to using &&.

Cheers,

Josh

thesnow · 12-09-2011, 03:30 PM

It looks like the places.sqlite file is what stores the bookmarks, so you could conceivably write a bash script with a while loop that checks (at a specified interval, say once every 10 minutes) whether the file was updated during the last interval, and if so, run your menu script.

Code:

while [ TRUE ]

do
	if [ -n "$(find /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/XXXXXXX.default/places.sqlite -mmin -10)" ]
	then
	          run your script here
	fi
sleep 10m
done

SweetLou · 12-09-2011, 03:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by corp769

The easiest way is the following:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
firefox && command

"command" will execute after the firefox process finishes normally. Note that if firefox crashes, or an error is generated, "command" will not run, due to using &&.

Cheers,

Josh

Thanks, I didn't know about that technique. That should work. I just need to make a bash script that will run the two python files I have made.

SweetLou · 12-09-2011, 03:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thesnow

It looks like the places.sqlite file is what stores the bookmarks, so you could conceivably write a bash script with a while loop that checks (at a specified interval, say once every 10 minutes) whether the file was updated during the last interval, and if so, run your menu script.

Code:

while [ TRUE ]

do
	if [ -n "$(find /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/XXXXXXX.default/places.sqlite -mmin -10)" ]
	then
	          run your script here
	fi
sleep 10m
done

Sounds good, but places.sqlite also stores the history, typed addresses among other things, so every time you open Firefox or go to a new site/page the database will be updated. The table 'moz_bookmarks' is the table with just bookmark information. Not even all of it, there is another table with the name of the bookmark. I would need to just check if the table 'moz_bookmarks' was altered, unless I wanted to run my scripts every x minutes.

I was going to do a cronjob once a day to update XFCE's menu. I think I would rather use a cronjob than to run automatically every x minutes that Firefox is open.