[ILUG] ssh cleverness?

[Ronan Cunniffe]

Brendan Halpin wrote:

>I'm puzzled, and more than a little impressed.
>
>However, if I have firefox running locally on the laptop, an
>invocation of firefox on the work machine will not run it remotely,
>but will cause the laptop firefox to fetch the relevant page. Very
>clever[1]. But how does it do it? In particular, *what* knows that
>I have firefox running on the X-server? Is it ssh? sshd? X?
>Firefox? The FSM? 
>  
>
Of *course* the FSM knows!  Eh, what *kind* of heretic are you trying to be?

Heh.  Have a look at /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox (or wherever it hides on 
your box).  It's a shell script, and yes, you will be impressed - Grep 
for 'check_running', or "xfeDoCommand(openBrowser".  This had me 
scratching my head for a while too, once upon a time, and I still don't 
know *why* they do this.

Ronan