Shell Programming and Scripting

Originally Posted by plsbbg

REALLY new to this stuff, sorry.

So I want a shell script to open a program, wait 45 minutes, close it, and then do it all again. I want to do this because I am running an iMacros Script for a long period of time and if Firefox is not constantly restarted, memory leaks start to happen.

Anyway heres my script:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
while :
do
'/usr/lib64/iceweasel/iceweasel imacros://run/?m=macro.iim' &
sleep 5
'/usr/lib64/iceweasel/iceweasel imacros://run/?m=macro.iim' &
sleep 2700
killall firefox-bin
done

When I open it using "sh /root/whatever.sh" I get this error:
"line 12: syntax error near unexpected token 'done'"
"line 12: done"

Can anyone help? thanks!

edit: oh yeah, for anyone who isnt familiar to iMacros scripting, running the macro twice after 5 seconds is needed because firefox is not properly loaded during this time

If you're saying that it takes firefox 5 seconds to load before you can run your iMacros script; why not start firefox, sleep 5 seconds, and then launch your iMacros script instead of starting the script twice when you know the first one will fail and maybe leave firefox in an "unknown" state.

The error messages you're getting are from line 12 in some script that isn't identifying itself. Since there are only 9 lines in the shell script you're showing us, this script isn't producing the error. Could the error message be coming from the iMacros script that is failing to start properly?

Rather than killing firefox, it would be much better to debug your iMacros script to stop leaking memory.

What do you see if you run the command:

Code:

'/usr/lib64/iceweasel/iceweasel imacros://run/?m=macro.iim'

at a time when firefox is not running?

What do you see if you run the same command when firefox is running?

What does your iMacros script look like?

Command Line Support

You can start imacros (or Javascript scripts) inside of Firefox via the command line:

Code:

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"  imacros://run/?m=...

or

Code:

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"  imacros://run/?code=...

for instance:

Code:

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"  imacros://run/?m=Demo-FillForm.iim

Note: When you first start Firefox via the command line the iMacros extension is not immediately active . It takes a few seconds for Firefox to activate it. So the imacros://run/ command does get intercepted already but not yet processed by iMacros and a blank page appears.

Solution: Make sure that Firefox is already running. If you start Firefox a second time, Firefox will direct this new command automatically to the already running instance. Now iMacros can "see" the imacros://run/ URL and start the macro.

You can use a batch file like this:

Code:

 start /B "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"  http://www.google.com
 ping 127.1.1.1 (or pause or sleep ... it is just to cause a small delay)
 start /B "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"   imacros://run/?m=Demo-FillForm.iim

Note: If you use the batch start command, Firefox must be the default browser.

More information: Our users created several useful forum posts about the command line feature:

Automating task each day
Problem with starting imacros
Starting a script from DOS cmd line?
Batch File: Load Firefox, Run Macro(s), Close
Schedule macros with the "My Weekly Browsing Schedule" add-on (slides 30-31)
Alternative solution: If you need more control over Firefox you can use the iMacros Scripting Interface that comes with the iMacros Enterprise Edition. This method gives you complete control over Firefox and Internet Explorer. For example, you can return error codes or extracted data from the browser to your program or script.

For Mac OS X users: to start a macro from the OS X command line or as a scheduled job, you can use the following command syntax (Thanks to Christopher A. for this hint):

Code:

/usr/bin/open /Applications/Firefox.app "imacros://run/?m=Demo-FillForm.iim"

Originally Posted by Don Cragun

What operating system are you running? The comment I marked above in red seems to directly address your issue. The code I marked in blue is their suggestion for how to handle the issue on Windows (which looks exactly like what I suggested), and the code I marked in green is their suggestion for how to handle the issue on Mac OS X.

What operating system are you using? What is your "default" browser? What type of shell is /bin/sh on your system (an old Bourne shell as on Solaris 10 systems, a Korn shell as on many other UNIX systems, a bash shell as on many Linux systems, or something else)?

Do you have iMacros Enterprise Edition?

Note that showing us your MODIFIED script and the errors produced by your unmodified script makes it harder for you to get help. Having us look at error messages that don't match your code makes it impossible for us to diagnose your problem and makes us wonder if we can trust anything you show us.

Originally Posted by plsbbg

I'm running Debian. And yes, I did what the website said to do on Windows. Those are commands for batch files. I'm running Debian, not Windows.
Don't know what /bin/sh is on the system.

I'm running Firefox. I'm not using the enterprise edition. The script isn't modified, I just removed some comments at the top