How to restart ES from a script?

TMNTturtlguy

That did it! Success....I am now back to running without getting the errors. @cyperghost your script does work well. I am going to upload the update to github. If you are willing it would be great for you to test. It is easy for you to delete the script after testing if you don't find it useful. Thanks for all the help. Will be interested to see how updates to ES will affect this.

cyperghost

@BuZz
The problem is that you can't kill ES with killall command.
It will return to bash prompt and you are not able to restart in graphical mode on your TV (via SSH yes that works)

So I seem to kill the latest child process that forces ES to restart IF a es-restart is present in /tmp

meleus script kills two pids... and then ES is gone like killall.

Maybe now you understand my "EUREKA" ;)

BuZz

@cyperghost perhaps he accidently killed the parent bash script. Killing all ES processes or just one shouldn't make a difference. I'll test though.

cyperghost

@BuZz
Please test... maybe you understand my EUREKA today, okay?
This was really tricky

meleu

@cyperghost @TMNTturtlguy
Some background I would like to share with you guys:

when you type emulationstation in the shell, it executes /usr/bin/emulationstation
the /usr/bin/emulationstation is a shell script that calls /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation.sh.
the /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation.sh calls the /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation and this is the real emulationstation binary.
the /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation.sh has a logic to restart ES, restart system and shutdown system based on the existence of some specific files in /tmp. The code of this script can be seen here.
in my failed attempt to restart ES from commandline, I was trying create the /tmp/es-restart and kill only the ES binary. According to the emulationstation.sh it's enough to restart ES. But as we saw, my approach is killing the emulationstation.sh too, and that is what is "crashing".

I'll try something more concise this evening, but if @cyperghost has some free time now and would like to investigate more, my suggestion is to find a way to kill only that very specific binary: /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation.

I used those metacharacters on my pkill regex to try to match some edge cases (like running a custom branch ES or launching ES with some parameter).

P.S.: now that I see @BuZz is aboard, I'm sure that the elegant solution is coming. :)

BuZz

@cyperghost I think the problem is just the emulationstation.sh is being killed (which handles the restarting). Should be simple enough to avoid killing that. eg specifying the process name exactly rather than pattern matching.

cyperghost

@BuZz Please go on.... I think it is not as easy
Because I manually lauched /opt.../ emulationstation.sh and that did not workd.
@TMNTturtlguy discovered the /tmp thing today +1 for him

BuZz

@cyperghost It should be. I would guess at something like

touch /tmp/es-restart; killall -e "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation"

should be fine.

cyperghost

let me test...

BuZz

or to work with emulationstation running from any path. (eg with emulationstation-kids etc).

touch /tmp/es-restart; pkill -f "/emulationstation$"

cyperghost

Works fine

touch /tmp/es-restart; killall -e "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation"

cyperghost

@BuZz said in How to restart ES from a script?:

pkill -f "/emulationstation$"

That let's restart just 2 PIDs... Does not work!

touch /tmp/es-restart; killall -e "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation"

runs fine all 3 PIDs are up to date

Man ... I even wrote use the tty1 outputs. So indeed the relauch script was killed

BuZz

@cyperghost said in How to restart ES from a script?:

pkill -f "/emulationstation$"

Worked here when I just tested.

cyperghost

@BuZz Wait I post output in a few minutes...

pi@retropie:~ $ ls /tmp
es-restart  omxplayerdbus.root  omxplayerdbus.root.pid
pi@retropie:~ $ ps -a
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
  862 tty1     00:00:00 bash
  867 tty1     00:00:00 bash
  868 tty1     00:00:00 emulationstatio
  874 tty1     00:00:00 emulationstatio
  877 tty1     00:00:13 emulationstatio
  990 pts/0    00:00:00 ps

The command pkill

pi@retropie:~ $ pkill -f -e "/emulationstation$"
emulationstatio killed (pid 868)
emulationstatio killed (pid 877)

check with ps -a

pi@retropie:~ $ ps -a
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
  862 tty1     00:00:00 bash
  874 tty1     00:00:00 emulationstatio
 1001 tty1     00:00:08 emulationstatio
 1071 pts/0    00:00:00 ps

worked now... sorry... but 2 PIDs alive
If PID 874 in my current setup will be killed than ES is wrecked.

Thank you

BuZz

@cyperghost use ps -fa as you can't tell what they are from that. probably parent bash scripts (which is correct - they shouldn't be killed).

TMNTturtlguy

@BuZz @cyperghost

touch /tmp/es-restart; killall -e "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation"

runs fine all 3 PIDs are up to date

When i use this in my script, it runs the first time. The second time i try to run it, the script crashes with error "cant remove /tmp/es-restart

cyperghost

@BuZz
Thank you I will remember that command!
Very usefull :)

cyperghost

@TMNTturtlguy I will check....
I tested all scripts 2 two 3 times... all runing fine

BuZz

@TMNTturtlguy said in How to restart ES from a script?:

@BuZz @cyperghost

touch /tmp/es-restart; killall -e "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation"

When i use this in my script, it runs the first time. The second time i try to run it, the script crashes with error "cant remove /tmp/es-restart

because custom retropie scripts are actually run as root - ill change that I think, but just make sure you create it owned by pi for now.

sudo -u pi touch /tmp/es-restart
pkill -f "/emulationstation$"

cyperghost

@BuZz Solid work!
Thank you