Shell Programming and Scripting

Hell Unix.com Community:

I am working on a personal project using yad v0.12.4 (zenity fork) and have hit a wall on how to show a progress bar while my function is processing.

I have been all over the ABS Guide, googled 21 Linux-specific sites that I revere. I even asked on the yad-common google group, but I remain stumped. If you don't know yad, think zenity on steroids.
The author suggested "while pkill -0 ec2-describe-snapshots ; do sleep 0.5; echo "qqq" done | yad --progress --pulsate" but I failed to get it working.

The script has 3 variables. 2 of which are in the function and those 2 go out and grab AWS snapshots and gets the count for each client.

Everything works until I try to implement a "--progress" meter while the function is running.

I want a progress meter to be displayed during the ~11 seconds it takes to execute the function. I have been partially successful at times, but my chop and hack method is driving me

My code can be seen at SUSE Paste

Thank you for your time.

I can't find a manual page for yad, but I see that you're feeding it data into standard input. Animated things like progress bars may not work if the process is talking to anything but a terminal, and a pipe's not a terminal; is there a way to give it data as commandline parameters instead?

Corona688:

That's a really good question, but I have to ponder it further before I reply to it.
Meanwhile, I stuck the contents of the man file at SUSE Paste
for your review.

Thank you,

Edit: the project page is at http://code.google.com/p/yad/ with code snippets etc... that may help you help me.

P.S. There's nothing that prevents me from using a zenity progress meter in my code, if that helps.

Oh, I see. You want yad to happen BEFORE your function finishes.

---------- Post updated at 09:16 PM ---------- Previous update was at 09:12 PM ----------

I don't think you can use a yad progress bar AND have yad accept text input at the same time -- how could it tell the difference between the two? Would a text progressbar do?

You don't see to be using yad for anything but displaying text anyway, so why use yad at all?

---------- Post updated at 09:32 PM ---------- Previous update was at 09:16 PM ----------

you could run a separate instance of yad...

Code:

touch /tmp/$$
# echo 1 to start it throbbing
# sleep until the file is deleted, then echo 100 to make it close
# () & to make it run in the background
( ( echo 1 ; while [ -f /tmp/$$ ] ; do sleep 1 ; done ; echo 100 ) | yad --progress --pulsate --auto-close --no-buttons ) &

some_long_command

rm /tmp/$$
wait # for the dialog made earlier to close

Corona688:

Perfect solution!!!
it is a thing of beauty.

Code:

touch /tmp/$$
( ( echo 1 ; while [ -f /tmp/$$ ] ; do sleep 1 ; done ; echo 100 ) | yad --progress --pulsate --auto-close \
--text="Retrieving Snapshots..." --width=150 --title="") & get_snapshots
rm /tmp/$$

Thank you very much.