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Shell script: Open program when closed?

Okay, here's the deal: I'm wanting to write a shell script that will act daemon-ish, and that I can set to run at login on a per-user basis.

The pseudo-code for what I am trying to accomplish would probably be something like:

Code:

(_beginning_)

if {firefox is not running}

then {start firefox}

else {wait until firefox closes}

(goto "beginning")

Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this?

Note: This is for an experimental kiosk-type environment.

Hi.

You'd probably be better just using a while loop, e.g.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

while true

do

    firefox

done

With that every time firefox exits, it'll go round the loop and restart it.

Dave

Quote:

Originally Posted by computer_freak_8 (Post 3388057)

Code:

(_beginning_)

if {firefox is not running}

then {start firefox}

else {wait until firefox closes}

(goto "beginning")

Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this?

Note: This is for an experimental kiosk-type environment.

Presumably for kiosk use you will have a user account set up with limited priveledges, restricted shell, etc. You could put something like this in that user's .profile or shell rc file:

while true;
do firefox;
done

The user could of course switch focus to the terminal where the shell is running and Ctrl-C out of the loop. Maybe slightly better would be logging in on a vt and using xinit to run only firefox and nothing else in an X session.

But why reinvent the wheel? There are packages like pessalus (not sure of spelling) that are made for this purpose and have already taken security into consideration.

Thank you both so much.

I discovered that Firefox is set to automatically start when the X server starts. When Firefox is closed, it shuts down the X server.

So, here's what I added to the "~/.profile" file:

Code:

while true

do startx

done

As a test (after a reboot), I switched to the terminal and hit [Ctrl]+[C]. The X server quit and restarted, which in turn reopened Firefox.

Thanks again,
computer_freak_8