OpenOffice Quickstarter (Linux) in Perl

mpolo has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've finally gotten sick and tired of OpenOffice.org taking over 30 seconds to open on my computer, when M$Word running uner Wine (Crossover) is near instantaneous.

Unfortunately, the Gnome OOOQuickstart project is still supporting only Gnome 2.2, so I decided to write a stupid, brute force solution (sort of) in Perl.

Here is my (basically working) code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
 
while (1) {
    
  my $running=`ps ax|grep "soffice.bin -quickstart"`;
  if ($running !~ /openoffice/) {
    # don't match if only the "grep" is there
    sleep 5;
    # give the process time to end to avoid silly crashes...
    system("/usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin -quickstart -plugi
+n");
  }
}
[download]

My question (given the category I posted under, you knew it was coming to this...) is what would be a "good" Perl solution to this? I mean, this is functional and all, but I'm just making repeated system calls -- my program doesn't deserve the name of perlscript, because it's really just a shellscript in Perl clothing.

Comment on OpenOffice Quickstarter (Linux) in Perl Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: OpenOffice Quickstarter (Linux) in Perl by halley (Prior) on Mar 08, 2004 at 14:01 UTC
Is there some reason that perl's built-in `grep` is less useful than starting a whole 'nother piped process? while (1) { if (not grep { /soffice\.bin -quickstart/ } `ps ax`) { sleep 5; system('/usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin -quickstart -plugi +n'); } } [download] Now you don't have to worry about the whole "grep in ps" work-around. -- `[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: OpenOffice Quickstarter (Linux) in Perl by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Mar 08, 2004 at 11:40 UTC
Perl being a glue language, this is a good Perl solution. I mean, this is functional and all, Right. What else do you need? It's functional, it's less than 10 lines of code. Be happy. Abigail	[reply]
Re: OpenOffice Quickstarter (Linux) in Perl by Corion (Patriarch) on Mar 08, 2004 at 11:49 UTC
To prevent the `ps ax\|grep` combo from finding itself, I encode one char within a character class like this: `ps ax\|grep '[s]office.bin -quickstart'` [download] I would maybe move the whole loop out of the program and put it into a `cron` job that runs every minute instead, but other than that, I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: OpenOffice Quickstarter (Linux) in Perl by kal (Hermit) on Mar 08, 2004 at 12:00 UTC
The "ps not finding itself" problem is usually soluable with pgrep, which is present in Solaris, GNU/Linux, and probably most other modern OSes of similar type. Functionally, it's not really any different than your trick above, but pgrep is so useful I thought it was worth a separate mention. I would think a better way - rather than looping based on timeout - would be to fork, exec() OOo in the child, and then join the child. That would have the loop effect, but without the constant polling. It would (probably) remove the need to look for the process too, which could be useful (do you know whether or not your user has the ability to talk to the other process, for example? I don't know the answer to that, but I would think it would be an obvious question).	[reply]
Re: Re: OpenOffice Quickstarter (Linux) in Perl by belg4mit (Prior) on Mar 08, 2004 at 13:16 UTC
Using the c option of GNU grep uses only the executable name `-- I'm not belgian but I play one on TV.`	[reply]
Re: OpenOffice Quickstarter (Linux) in Perl by zakzebrowski (Curate) on Mar 08, 2004 at 12:32 UTC
I agree with the laziness idiom. However, you may want to look at the Proc::Process module. It allows you to look at a process table on unix / linux, so you don't have to shell out to do the ps -aef \| grep ... ---- Zak - the office	[reply]
Re: OpenOffice Quickstarter (Linux) in Perl by mpolo (Chaplain) on Aug 12, 2005 at 15:35 UTC
Update for OpenOffice 2.0 (Beta), incorporating some of the suggestions from the thread. The "-quickstart" flag is no longer there, but using the two flags "-nodefault -nologo", you can get the same results. Hopefully this is useful to someone. #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; while (1) { if (not grep {/soffice\.bin/} `ps ax`) { sleep 5; # give the process time to end... system("/usr/lib/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice.bin -nodefault +-nologo"); } } [download]	[reply] [d/l]


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