open a browser from the command line, wait a few seconds, and shut it. (ie, translate forking from bash to perl)

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

I have a bash script that opens a browser for a few seconds, and then closes it.

Could someone point me up the equivelant in perl?

I reckon this amounts to, what's the process for translating forking from bash to perl.

#!/bin/bash
konqueror http://www.google.com &
pid=$!

# give the page some time to load
sleep 5
kill $pid
[download]

UPDATE:

By the way, this isn't an academic question -- I'm using this simple script to verify various html downloads by checking the konqueror html cache for text strings I'm interested in, for pages that can't be easily downloaded with wget/web mechanize because of javascript and redirect nastiness.

Also, for those interested in shell-equivelance strategies, I posted essentially the same question to haskell-cafe.

Comment on open a browser from the command line, wait a few seconds, and shut it. (ie, translate forking from bash to perl) Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: open a browser from the command line, wait a few seconds, and shut it. (ie, translate forking from bash to perl) by ikegami (Patriarch) on Mar 08, 2007 at 18:11 UTC
`use IPC::Open2 qw( open2 ); my $pid = open2(my $to_child, my $from_child, 'konqueror', $url); sleep(5); kill(TERM => $pid);` [download] Since we don't care about pipes, the above boils down to `my $pid = fork(); if (!defined($pid)) { die("Unable to fork: $!\n"); } if (!$pid) { exec('konqueror', $url); die("Unable to exec: $!\n"); } sleep(5); kill(TERM => $pid);` [download] Don't forget to cleanup zombies using `waitpid`. Update: Added second snippet. Update: Oops! I was using `kill($pid, TERM);`. Thanks, Fletch.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: open a browser from the command line, wait a few seconds, and shut it. (ie, translate forking from bash to perl) by tphyahoo (Vicar) on Mar 08, 2007 at 18:27 UTC
Neither of these snippets behaves like the bash snippet, though. Konqueror is opened, but then not shut.	[reply]
Re^3: open a browser from the command line, wait a few seconds, and shut it. (ie, translate forking from bash to perl) by Fletch (Bishop) on Mar 08, 2007 at 18:43 UTC
Flip the order of the arguments to kill, `kill( TERM => $pid )` (/msg'd ikegami about this as well).	[reply] [d/l]
Re: open a browser from the command line, wait a few seconds, and shut it. (ie, translate forking from bash to perl) by ikegami (Patriarch) on Mar 08, 2007 at 18:52 UTC
Regarding your updated, have you considered Win32::IE::Mechanize or Mozilla::Mechanize?	[reply]
Re^2: open a browser from the command line, wait a few seconds, and shut it. (ie, translate forking from bash to perl) by tphyahoo (Vicar) on Mar 08, 2007 at 19:09 UTC
I was aware of and decided to use these modules, but can't remember why anymore. I think it had something to do with them also not being ok with javascript. But I may have been wrong about that, and will give it another shot. Currently though, after `perl -MCPAN -e 'install Mozilla::DOM'` I'm getting `* can not find package for any of (mozilla-xpcom >= 1.7, firefox-xpc +om >= 1.0, mozilla-firefox-xpcom >= 1.0) * check that one of them is properly installed and available in PKG_ +CONFIG_PATH` [download] apt-cache search isn't pulling these up on my ubuntu box. (and package management is completely &)#@ed on the SUSE 10.1 box I use at work.) UPDATE: regarding the above, I guess I need to start at http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Build_Documentation (It's just not in .deb form yet). But I'm going home now, so perhaps to be continued.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: open a browser from the command line, wait a few seconds, and shut it. (ie, translate forking from bash to perl) by Tinkster (Novice) on Jul 22, 2007 at 05:16 UTC
I just stumbled into the same situation yesterday ... Did you find a solution/work-around for this? Cheers, Tink	[reply]


There's more than one way to do things
	PerlMonks