[GRASS-dev] GRASS_BATCH_JOB vs GUI

[Joe Ostrowski]

Being resent as this didn't make it to the list last night.  It  
answers some questions posed, but bottom line, WK's latest grass.sh -  
sent directly to me - for OSX provides for my needs.  At this time,  
at least.

Joe

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Joe Ostrowski <jtostrowski at comcast.net>
> Date: April 5, 2008 11:33:03 PM EDT
> To: Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com>
> Cc: grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org
> Subject: Re: [GRASS-dev] GRASS_BATCH_JOB vs GUI
>
> To answer your questions...
>
> This is William Kyngesburye's 6.3.0RC6 for Mac OSX (I'm on 10.4.11)  
> binary installation.
>
> I did modify the .xinitrc so the xterm doesn't fire off.  X11 still  
> does but only once with a revised grass.sh script sent by WK.
>
> In previous grass.sh incarnations provided by WK (I've been  
> corresponding with him privately), the GUI didn't pop up, just the  
> X term and the Terminal app.  But just once.  No new terms appeared  
> but the focus was given to X every time grass.sh was called from  
> the batch script.  In the most recent grass.sh provided by Mr.  
> Kyngesburye, neither of those terminals initiate.  Only X11 does,  
> with no xterm.  Focus is momentarily taken by X but immediately  
> returned to the top-o-heap window.  This only happens once if X is  
> not previously activated.
>
> Problem was not overlapping grass sessions.  They were all sequential.
>
> Off-the-clock for me means "cron", coming from the Linux world.  I  
> haven't dabbled with that yet for OSX, but I think it's called  
> launchd.
>
> Shell is bash and 10.4 is the first version on this box.
>
> Doing the batch background processing in Linux works fine.  It was  
> only on OSX using the WK dist that wasn't working how I thought it  
> should.
>
> Soooo...
>
> With either my hack based on the GRASS_BATCH_JOB detection keeping  
> X and Terminal at bay or the latest WK version, I've got what I  
> need.  I don't believe any other changes are necessary.
>
> Thanks for all the help.
>
> On Apr 5, 2008, at 10:52 PM, Hamish wrote:
>
>>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>        
>> _____________________________________________________________________ 
>> _______________
>> You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of  
>> Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost.
>> http://tc.deals.yahoo.com/tc/blockbuster/text5.com
>>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/attachments/20080406/b29a129f/attachment-0001.html