Re: [Pan-users] Feature req.: background retrive

[Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom]

> > Am  I wasting my time doing this? Should I RTFM because pan can already do
> > this? Should I look at pan itself and make a -b / --background option?
> 
> This is on the slate of things to do, basically, allow PAN to be run from the 
> command line, with a switch to activate it with a special, permanent, tasks 
> file, no GUI.  I don't recall seeing it as being there, yet, but a patch for 
> that purpose would indeed likely be appreciated.

I'd be happy with a mechanism to pass pan a signal of some sort; which would
cause it to execute the 'download headers from all subscribed groups'
command. should be trivial to generalize that to pass it any arbitrary
command tho.

so something like
$ pan --execute-command='download headers from all subscribed groups'
or 
$ pan --execute-command='ctrl+shift+u'

this would check if there's a session running already; and if so, pass that
session a signal (via whatever mechanism; shm, UNIX sockets, IP sockets) to
execute the given command.
if there isn't a session already; start one and then run that command.

Galeon (and I think mozilla) do something like this (not the arbitrary
command part; but they'll spawn a new thread from an existing session,
rather than starting a new one, if you try to execute it more than once).

if you wanted to run it on a headless box; a hack would be to set it to
display to an Xvfb (virtual framebuffer) session. (tho true headless
operation would be nice).

Carl Soderstrom.
-- 
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com