How can I launch a program from a bash XTerm and run a while loop at the same time?
How can I launch a program from a bash XTerm and run a while loop at the same time?
I want to launch Oobabooga Textgen WebUI from the command line with its serial output. I also want to run a while loop that retrieves the Nvidia GPU memory available and temperature for display on the header bar with a 5 second sleep delay. How do I run both of those at the same time?
as already mentioned, ampersand allows you to "background" a task. but if you'd like the output from your program alongside the loop monitoring system info, consider using a terminal multiplexer like tmux.
on the terminal, this will let you open a "split screen" pane with another shell. you can use hotkeys to create, destroy, or move between views.
Or something like tee
Already using Terminator and just separate terminals with a bunch of unnecessary extras to create a colorful monitoring output that changes colors as I run out of available memory. In truth I just need the number and temperature. I hate the giant Gnome headers, so I might as well put something useful in one. I don't use the gnome terminal because it can't split windows and always hogs my space with that obtuse header. I'm trying to make everything simply run from a single command in a single terminal.
I don't want to run additional complex tools, especially anything ancient that expects users to memorize unique hotkey commands. My brain is just too small for everyone's hotkeys and the other things I'm interested in spending time on in life.
Worst case I can nest my functions another layer deep. I think there should be a way to do this inside a single function.
Ampersand
Indeed that works in the terminal to launch both my function and the application.
How would I do this inside a single function, like launch, then drop into the loop?
I would just background the while loop, and then launch your ootaboogah.
Xterm supports multiple tabs right? Do that? If not then tmux.
I'd just use tmux. Check NetworkChuck's recent video on the topic
Shouldn't your LLM be solving this problem.for you? 😂
Seriously though, if not two terms, then just background one or both of these commands.
I didn't ask AI about this one yet. It could likely give me most of the answers here to various degrees. My best models are similar in scope to stack exchange combined with the randomness of whatever happens to pop up first in DDG results. It isn't good at explaining the various ways a task can be done in practice. Like it likely 'knows' all the various ways, and will generate each of them if prompted slightly differently from scratch each time. But, if you try and have a longer dialog context where it has previously generated a solution, it will likely struggle to accurately describe other methods. LLMs are also pretty good with bash, but they suck at sh or busybox's ash. There is just not enough training data present in these niches with the general models.
However, I asked here primarily in an attempt to increase my posts contributions to Lemmy in hopes of keeping people engaged and around long term. Who doesn't like helping random people with things in this format. I could easily find the answer to this on my own. Asking something on the back of my mind that I have been putting off was just engagement and trying to improve my fundamental scripting skills. Sorry if that somehow offends.
You probably want to make a launcher script. An easy start would be to background your main process and route the output wherever you want. Run your monitor loop and send the output wherever you want. Then you can examine and kill the main background pid on script exit. The simplest way in bash might be something like kill $(jobs -p)
This can get a bit more complicated if you want it all to exit if anything fails or something like that. Read up on pkill, disown, kill, $$, trap…tons of possibilities
Some of these things aren’t very portable though, so do check if you decide to switch shells….or do what the rest of us do and scratch your head for an hour before cussing ourselves for not being posix compliant, swear we will next time, then don’t
Is there a particular reason you can't just open 2 xterm and run each command in its own ?
Amp-off and use nohup
Gnu parallels perhaps