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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
I would just background the while loop, and then launch your ootaboogah.
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'm having trouble understanding the question.
while true; do update-header-bar-or-whatever; sleep 5; done &
oogabooga
... will run the header update every 5 seconds, while oogabooga is running. Is that what you want?
If I launch like that it would stop at the oobabooga app launch until the job completed then it would resume the loop.
Ultimately, I'm doing more complex stuff and simplifying the question so it may seem slightly overkill to say I need it to work like this. I want to do some container checks, setup, and launch multiple applications with my own parsing flags and some conditional sourcing.
This only part I can't seem to grasp very well is how to run that little loop and update the header while other stuff launches with its serial terminal set to the same one the loop is running inside.
$ while true; do echo Hello, I updated the header; sleep 5; done &
[1] 1631507
$ Hello, I updated the header
sleep 30; echo Sleep is done.
Hello, I updated the header
Hello, I updated the header
Hello, I updated the header
Hello, I updated the header
Hello, I updated the header
Hello, I updated the header
Hello, I updated the header
Sleep is done.
Hello, I updated the header
$ kill %1
[1]+ Terminated while true; do
echo Hello, I updated the header; sleep 5;
done
$
Edit: I'm fairly confident now that you're just thinking the loop will stop when you run oogabooga, but that's not how it works. That up above is how it works; the loop keeps going during the sleep with them both going on the same terminal, then after the sleep process terminates, I kill the loop, but for the whole 30 seconds previous, they were both going. It'll be the same with oogabooga. This the situation you're asking about, yes?
If you're doing more complex stuff, maybe spend a few days learning the basics of bash
I'd just use tmux. Check NetworkChuck's recent video on the topic
Xterm supports multiple tabs right? Do that? If not then tmux.
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 ?
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.
Gnu parallels perhaps