How to close terminal window when launching app from command line

Casket · 10-30-2007, 04:37 PM

Hi all,

I've created a couple of shell scripts (using sudo) and linked a desktop icon to them to allow my users to be able to launch 'root only' applications. Whenever it does this though a terminal session always stays open in another windows (if you press CTRL+C it will close the application).

Is there anyway to prevent this from happening and just have the application active?

Thanks

Dinithion · 10-30-2007, 04:50 PM

You could open them with screen and detach then with ctrl+ad

Casket · 10-30-2007, 06:43 PM

Is there a simple way to do this? The users are fairly compute illiterate and quite simply would bitch and moan if any additional steps needed to be taken.

Casket · 10-30-2007, 07:16 PM

Okay I figured out a semi-solution:

The icon on the desktop calls upon /usr/bin/pptp.sh which contains the following:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
sudo /usr/sbin/pptpconfig

The sudoers file allows the user to run this command only without a password. If i change the shell script to:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
sudo nohup /usr/sbin/pptpconfig

and add /usr/bin/nohup to the sudoers file, it allows the user to open the application up and close the terminal window without closing down the application.

If this can be automated to close down the terminal window when the program is launched it would be a great solution. I have tried appending | exit on to the end and putting exit in a new line in the shell script but it does not work.

Thanks

chrism01 · 10-31-2007, 06:52 AM

how about backgrounding it as well eg

Code:

#!/bin/sh
sudo nohup /usr/sbin/pptpconfig &
exit

Casket · 10-31-2007, 06:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrism01

how about backgrounding it as well eg

Code:

#!/bin/sh
sudo nohup /usr/sbin/pptpconfig &
exit

Hi Chrism,

That didn't work. When the desktop icon is double clicked a terminal window appears for a breif second and then closes without launching the application.

dwhitney67 · 11-01-2007, 01:39 AM

Casket -

I may have a solution for you. I use under my Fedora 7 system and it permits me to close the xterm, yet leaving the pptpconfig front-end still running.

In my launcher, I added this command:

Code:

xterm -g 50x5 -title "Enter sudo password..." -e 'xhost + >& /dev/null; sudo /usr/bin/pptpconfig'

P.S. I setup my launcher to run as an "application" (not an "application in terminal").

Casket · 11-01-2007, 05:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dwhitney67

Casket -

I may have a solution for you. I use under my Fedora 7 system and it permits me to close the xterm, yet leaving the pptpconfig front-end still running.

In my launcher, I added this command:

Code:

xterm -g 50x5 -title "Enter sudo password..." -e 'xhost + >& /dev/null; sudo /usr/bin/pptpconfig'

P.S. I setup my launcher to run as an "application" (not an "application in terminal").

Hi Dwhitney -

That worked

However seeing as though my user doesn't need to enter a sudo password to run pptpconfig, is there a chance of modifying the command so it simply just launches?

Also I see your using /usr/bin/pptpconfig, I'm using /usr/sbin/pptpconfig - do you believe there are much differences here?

dwhitney67 · 11-02-2007, 06:05 AM

Casket

Until today, I was not aware of the alternate pptpconfig in /usr/sbin.

When I attempted to use it (as a non-root user), it launched, but my stored VPN contact information (which I had created earlier as root using the alternate pptpconfig) was not displayed. When I attempted to create a new contact, the application gave me an error indicating that it failed to open /etc/pptpconfig/lock and thus it could not save the information. The permissions of the lock file do not permit non-root users to write.

Can you please confirm what the settings are on your system's lock file and for the two versions of the pptpconfig applications?

Code:

$ ls -l /etc/pptpconfig/lock /usr/bin/pptpconfig /usr/sbin/pptpconfig
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root  0 2007-10-15 09:21 /etc/pptpconfig/lock
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2007-10-14 22:26 /usr/bin/pptpconfig -> consolehelper
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2007-10-14 22:26 /usr/sbin/pptpconfig -> ../bin/pptpconfig.php