Wait for command to finish before continuing

[jacobtomlinson]

Is it possible to wait for a command to finish before you continue typing.

I know I can use Sleep to wait but I might not know how long the command will take and it could be different every time.

[caarlos0]

this was discussed a bit in #14, but I agree we should do something about it

[maaslalani]

Yep! Thanks for this @jacobtomlinson, we'll definitely introduce something for this since it's probably the most common usecase. It will probably look something like one of these but other suggestions are welcome.

Run "sleep 2 && echo 'First!'"
Exec "sleep 2 && echo 'First!'"
Execute "sleep 2 && echo 'First!'"

[abhijit-hota]

I'm working on a PR for this. Will this support shell scripts? E.g.,

Exec "./script.sh"

or

Exec@file "./script.sh"

cc: @caarlos0 @maaslalani

[caarlos0]

IMHO, exec should:

• type the command
• press enter
• wait for the command to finish

so, IMHO there's no need to handle executing files, its just a Type ./file.sh; Enter

That said, not sure if we should or not support the Type options here too (like speed), but I guess we should

[maaslalani]

Another alternative is to have a Wait command that way we don't need to add all the options for typing speed and enter delays.

Type@100ms "./file" Sleep 0.5 Enter Wait

[abhijit-hota]

I tried implementing this but I am afraid I couldn't find a way to wait. We're using ttyd and AFAICT, there's no way of knowing the state of a process that is running inside ttyd.

Pointers are appreciated.

P.S., any reason we're using ttyd over GoTTY?

[maaslalani]

@abhijit-hota I had a similar concern. Is this possible with GoTTY? We can switch over to that.

I used ttyd since it looked more active and maintained.

[abhijit-hota]

Is this possible with GoTTY?

Doesn't seem so from the documentation.

I used ttyd since it looked more active and maintained.

Fair enough. Just checked that.

---

I have opened a support issue here: tsl0922/ttyd#1009

[maaslalani]

My plan is to support both ttyd and GoTTY so we can use whichever is installed on the machine.

[abhijit-hota]

As per tsl0922/ttyd#1009 (comment), ttyd cannot tell us that.

We need to get the pid of the process started inside ttyd when pressing Enter to check the state.

[maaslalani]

I think we can solve this with pgrep:

If someone wants to Exec "sleep 5" we can pgrep "sleep 5" every few milliseconds (100ms?) to wait for it to finish.

[abhijit-hota]

What do you think about the method suggested here: tsl0922/ttyd#1009 (comment)

[maaslalani]

Not sure we can use $! because we can't really type into the ttyd session since we are recording it. pgrep will let us look at the running processes outside the ttyd session which I think is desirable.

[abhijit-hota]

Makes sense. There is a chance of conflict between command when using pgrep.