[openbox] Pipe menus and background proccesses

[Neil Bird]

Around about 18/01/06 10:34, Manuel Colmenero typed ...
> No luck, openbox waits for this process too :(
> The idea is that a pipe outputs "Loading..." and starts an independent process to download an RSS.
> But OB waits for the background process, so it's kind of useless... I've tried spawning the process, system(".. &"), popen(".. &"), without any luck so far. The effect is that OB freezes while the RSS is being downloaded.

   What are you expecting it to do, though?

   From what you've said, you want an RSS-fed submenu.  So, you either have 
the prog. that generates the submenu go off and get the feed (in which case OB 
*has* to wait for it, as it can't draw the requested menu†), or you have a 
daemon running elsewhere (I've done this in the past, but not with OB) dumping 
the feed (obmenu) to a file somewhere, and have your pipe submenu read this 
file;  then it'll be near-instant, but your feed may lag.


† - there's an outstanding nicety of having OB delay a little before 
proffering submenus to prevent unnecessary delays when traversing down the 
parent menu.

-- 
[neil at fnx ~]# rm -f .signature
[neil at fnx ~]# ls -l .signature
ls: .signature: No such file or directory
[neil at fnx ~]# exit