[ILUG] Script Query

[David Golden]

On Sunday 06 April 2008, Ian wrote:

> i want to create a script that opens a webpage, closes after 1 minute
> and opens a different page, this should happen over and over again?
> anyone any ideas how i should set this up?
>

For some sort of sales stand display thing by any chance?  If so, 
killing and restarting a heavyweight lump like a modern browser may be 
somewhat wasteful and ugly/flickery (but has the definite advantage 
that slow memory leaks won't build up).

Both firefox and konqueror have interfaces that allow you to load new 
urls from the command line with an existing browser instance.  
Unfortunately the simple mozilla-xremote-client that comes with firefox 
doesn't seem to allow replacing contents of  existing windows, nor does 
kfmclient, they only seem to opening URLs into new tabs or new windows.
(I could be wrong!)

KDE konqueror's dcop interface allows you to replace existing windows, 
though is a little trickier to use - 
If you have KDE 3.x installed, try the following simple script (not 
intended to be an example of good shell style), and note
it's relative smoothness compared to spawning&killing a browser instance 
for each page.

I'd expect firefox could support a similar, probably dbus, interface one 
day, if it doesn't already.

#!/bin/bash
# it's 4:00am! Don't let David write code!
konqueror &
KPID=$!
trap "kill $KPID" EXIT
# bodge to just wait for konqueror to finish starting.
sleep 5
# fullscreen.
dcop "konqueror-$KPID" konqueror-mainwindow#1 activateAction fullscreen

for i in \
  http://penny-arcade.com/comic/ \
  http://qwantz.com/ \
  http://phdcomics.com/comics.php \
  http://xkcd.com/
do
  dcop "konqueror-$KPID" konqueror-mainwindow#1 openURL "$i"
  sleep 10
done