[GRASS-dev] GRASS_BATCH_JOB vs GUI

[Hamish]

> Joe O. wrote:
> > When I first tried to execute the scripts in OSX both an X term and a
> > Terminal app window would pop up stealing focus from whatever I was
> > doing in another window.

the first thing I do after installing X11 on Mac OSX is to stop it from
launching a xterm upon X11 startup.

go to a terminal
$ sudo su
# cd /etc/X11/xinit
# chmod u+w xinitrc

then edit the xinitrc file and #comment out the line at the end which
calls xterm

that stops some of the mess, but GRASS in text mode should never even
call X11, or pop up a new xterm, something else might be doing that.
(binary packager's startup script?)

FWIW, ISTR that OSX 10.5 launches X11 on process-demand, whereas in
earlier versions you have to launch in manually.


> > The looping in the script would fire off grass repeatedly and every
> > time grass would keep the window I was working in at the top of the
> > heap but the cursor/mouse focus would be taken away by the X term
> > window.

check your ~/.grassrc6 file has "GRASS_GUI: text". If not, start grass
from the terminal prompt with "grass63 -text" once, then text mode should
be set as the default. (but I think GRASS_BATCH_JOB should be overriding
whatever is there anyway)

to confirm: the gui is not popping up, just extra terminal windows?


Can you add something to your scripts that launch grass to test for an
existing session?

if [ -z "$GISBASE" ] ; then
  grass63 /path/to/mapset # to run batch job
else
  echo "ERROR: already in a grass session"
  # shrug, run it anyway
  . /path/to/batchjob.sh
fi


is your shell csh or bash? ("echo $SHELL")  If the machine was upgraded
from older versions of OSX, enduring user accounts may still be using
csh.


> > I tinkered with the grass.sh script 
...
> > to bypass any of the GUI setup (X and Terminal windows) when
> > GRASS_BATCH_JOB is non-empty.  That provided the behavior I was
> > after and didn't interfere with interactive use, so setting and
> > acting upon a switch to indicate background execution will work.

can you islotate the problematic part of the script?

is this a 6.3.0RC or 6.3svn version of GRASS?
self compiled or one of the binary packages? who's binary package?

by starting scripts "by the clock", do you mean using OSX's replacement
for cron jobs? (I forget what they called that)


Glynn: 
> GRASS_BATCH_JOB is a bit of a hack.

perhaps that is true, but it should work. And if it doesn't work it
should be fixed.

would a command line option for batch job be better? init.sh could be
written to act in a similar way to GRASS's G_parser():

grass63 mapset=/path/to/mapset batch=/path/to/batchjob.sh
?


Hamish



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