This is a (last resort) way to automate applications that provide no other ways for automation, it would send 'Hello world' to the currently active window. See the manpage (and the -text and -window entries) for how to send special characters and target specific windows. An example: Using xwininfo, I get the id of my XPlanet background window: alanceil@kvirasim:19:51:0:~> xwininfo xwininfo: Please select the window about which you would like information by clicking the mouse in that window. xwininfo: Window id: 0x3600001 "Xplanet 1.2.0" Absolute upper-left X: 0 (..etc..) Now I use xvkbd to tell it to close itself: xvkbd -xsendevent -window 0x3600001 -text "Q" Obviously, the best way is to put these commands in a shellscript - just make sure to include a short sleep (sleep .1 should suffice) after each xvkbd call, or some programs will become confused.

Referring to the original post, if you are using $! then that means the process is a child of the current shell, so you can just use `wait $!`. If you are trying to wait for a process created outside of the current shell, then the loop on `kill -0 $PID` is good; although, you can't get the exit status of the process.

This one-liner is for cron jobs that need to provide some basic information about a filesystem and the time it takes to complete the operation. You can swap out the di command for df or du if that's your thing. The |& redirections the stderr and stdout to the mail command. How to configure the variables. TOFSCK=/path/to/mount FSCKDEV=/dev/path/device or FSCKDEV=`grep $TOFSCK /proc/mounts | cut -f1 -d" "` MAILSUB="weekly file system check $TOFSCK " Show Sample Output

If you really _must_ use a loop, this is better than parsing the output of 'ps': PID=$! ;while kill -0 $PID &>/dev/null; do sleep 1; done kill -0 $PID returns 0 if the process still exists; otherwise 1

Use this command to execute the contents of http://www.example.com/automation/remotescript.sh in the local environment. The parameters are optional. Alterrnatives to wget: CURL: curl -s http://www.example.com/automation/remotescript.sh | bash /dev/stdin param1 param2 W3M: w3m -dump http://www.example.com/automation/remotescript.sh | bash /dev/stdin [param1] [param2] LYNX: lynx -source http://www.example.com/automation/remotescript.sh | bash /dev/stdin [param1] [param2]

The '[r]' is to avoid grep from grepping itself. (interchange 'r' by the appropriate letter) Here is an example that I use a lot (as root or halt will not work): while (ps -ef | grep [w]get); do sleep 10; done; sleep 60; halt I add the 'sleep 60' command just in case something went wrong; so that I have time to cancel. Very useful if you are going to bed while downloading something and do not want your computer running all night.