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Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / February 2005Automate Launch & Close of App on a Schedule
What's the easiest way to automate closing an application at a specific time, then opening it again several hours later? AppleScript? QuickKeys? We need to close certain things overnight so they can be backed up, then open them again before we get in in the morning. Specs: G3 running OS 9.0.4 > What's the easiest way to automate closing an application at a specific > time, then opening it again several hours later? AppleScript? > QuickKeys? We need to close certain things overnight so they can be > backed up, then open them again before we get in in the morning. I'd suggest an AppleScript, which can then be triggered by Mac OS X's built-in cron daemon. Something like the one below should work: -- quit the applications safely, allowing them to cleanup tell application "Foo" to quit tell application "Bar" to quit tell application "Baz" to quit -- wait a minute to give the apps a chance to quit delay 60 -- quit any apps that didn't quit successfully the UNIX way do shell script "killall 'Foo'" do shell script "killall 'Bar'" do shell script "killall 'Baz'" -- wait a bit longer delay 15 -- kill any hangers-on with extreme prejudice do shell script "killall -9 'Foo'" do shell script "killall -9 'Bar'" do shell script "killall -9 'Baz'" That should do it.  SignatureJerry Kindall, Seattle, WA <http://www.jerrykindall.com/> Send only plain text messages under 32K to the Reply-To address. This mailbox is filtered aggressively to thwart spam and viruses. > -- quit the applications safely, allowing them to cleanup > tell application "Foo" to quit > > -- wait a minute to give the apps a chance to quit > delay 60 You just wrote a race condition. Why not wait until the quit command finishes, instead? > -- quit any apps that didn't quit successfully the UNIX way > -- kill any hangers-on with extreme prejudice Aaaaahrgh! Why not just send 'em a TERM signal, and make sure they really died? Get rid of all the "just in case" wait statements, and test for what should happen? > That should do it. Well, yeah, unless something goes wrong. I'd prefer to test and trigger, rather than "wait and hope and kill". Runs faster that way, too... > > -- quit the applications safely, allowing them to cleanup > > tell application "Foo" to quit [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > You just wrote a race condition. Why not wait until the quit > command finishes, instead? Is this a trick question? If you wait "until the quit command finishes," you're never going to give up and decide it's not going to quit. The way it works is, you give 'em plenty of opportunity to quit cleanly. If they don't, you make them quit. Any app that doesn't respond _for_an_entire_minute_ when you tell it to quit is hung, almost by definition. Or else it is waiting, like stupid iChat, for user permission to quit, wihch it's never going to get because there's nobody in front of the terminal. > > -- quit any apps that didn't quit successfully the UNIX way > > -- kill any hangers-on with extreme prejudice > > Aaaaahrgh! Why not just send 'em a TERM signal, and make sure > they really died? Get rid of all the "just in case" wait > statements, and test for what should happen? Well, what are you going to do if it didn't happen? Tell it again to do what it didn't do the last time you told it? How would that help? The nice thing about the killall is that it's a no-op if the app did quit properly (asuming the names are sufficiently unique). It saves the complicated if statements and whatnot. I was trying to keep the script simple enough so that, you know, the original poster could adapt it to his needs without having to understand _too_ much AppleScript. That's the same reason I didn't use a list with all the app names in it and a loop to go through them. SignatureJerry Kindall, Seattle, WA <http://www.jerrykindall.com/> Send only plain text messages under 32K to the Reply-To address. This mailbox is filtered aggressively to thwart spam and viruses. Wow, this is great, thanks. Two problems -- we're running OS 9, and I have no clue how to use AppleScript (I have a book, though, and I can write databases, so I'll probably get it). Jerry, is this going to work with OS 9? I'm sure you'll hear from me again, with whining when I don't get it right. > > > -- quit the applications safely, allowing them to cleanup > > > tell application "Foo" to quit [quoted text clipped - 38 lines] > Send only plain text messages under 32K to the Reply-To address. > This mailbox is filtered aggressively to thwart spam and viruses. > Wow, this is great, thanks. Two problems -- we're running OS 9, and I > have no clue how to use AppleScript (I have a book, though, and I can > write databases, so I'll probably get it). Jerry, is this going to work > with OS 9? Well, you can't use the lines with the "kill" commands, which makes Dave's critique of it moot. Those are UNIX shell commands and they only work on Mac OS X. But the tell application "Foo" to quit stuff will work. It's just that if an application is hung, or wants user input before it quits, it won't be quit. SignatureJerry Kindall, Seattle, WA <http://www.jerrykindall.com/> Send only plain text messages under 32K to the Reply-To address. This mailbox is filtered aggressively to thwart spam and viruses. Thanks for the help! > > Wow, this is great, thanks. Two problems -- we're running OS 9, and I > > have no clue how to use AppleScript (I have a book, though, and I can [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > Send only plain text messages under 32K to the Reply-To address. > This mailbox is filtered aggressively to thwart spam and viruses. |
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