How to restart ES from a script?

cyperghost

@meleu My friend this wasn`t to be intended as an offension. I wrote scripts but I ment binaries. As I wrote in my last posting..,,

They doing all the same: killing one specific process

I know it works and it is very save for future ES version what mine is not because mine just kills the last PID of ES and may by coincidence is the right one in future version. I think that are the correct conclusions.

Just for understanding....
This RegEx expression excludes the DOT . so no shell script would be killed.
But if a second instance as binary is named "emulationstation-newversion" then the expression would also be true.

And if there are running two processes from two binaries in the path /opt/retropie/supplementary/ ....

emulationstation
emulationstaten-debugging
then both will be killed or am I wrong?

I'm not very common with regex expressions ... still learning this but they are the holy grale for string processing.

TMNTturtlguy

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

wazzup guys!

in front of my RetroPie it is a way easier! Here is my one liner to restart ES with no issues (at least it works fine here):
touch /tmp/es-restart && pkill -f "/opt/retropie/supplementary/.*/emulationstation([^.]|$)"
Yes, the only difference is those / chars before and after .* in the regex. It's working fine thanks to this commit on RetroPie-Setup.

That one liner is able to restart ES even if the user is running a testing ES branch ( @TMNTturtlguy knows what I'm saying) and/or the user launched ES with some --arguments.

@TMNTturtlguy I hope it helps you.

Cheers!

@meleu @cyperghost I am back infront of my pi tonight and tied @meleu code as quoted here. This works much better as it lets me change es_systems, restarts and then i can go back into the retorpie menu and run my script again. However I still have issue when pressing start to go to the menu and then to either restart ES or shudown system. In both cases it just flashing my script and then restarts ES. The only way to get rid of this is to Kill the highest number ES and sudo touch and then sudo rm /tmp/es-restart

So I am trying to figure out why this won't work on my setup. So I went into .emulationstation and deleted all of the downloaded emulationstation files from testing. I then wen into /opt/restropie/supplementary/ and sudo rm -r all of the directories for all of the test ES builds I have worked on. A this point the only emulationstation directory in /opt/retropie/supplementary/ that exists is the main branch emulationstation. SO this should mean that the only es files i have are the standard build.

Re-ran @meleu script from above - same exact results, when you press start and go to the quit menu and select restart or shutdown, it flashes the script and restarts.

So i decided to retry @BuZz

touch /tmp/es-restart
pkill -f "/opt/retropie/supplementary/.*/emulationstation$"

This time the first time through it worked great. It did what it was supposed to do, i went to start and chose to restart system, it restarted the system! Great.....but nope, it only worked that time. system restarted, went to start, quite and boom flash of script and automatic restart of ES.

Here are my 2 take aways:
1 - what else do i need to remove so i can verify i only have the current main build of ES on my machine?
2- @cyperghost original script works - i am unclear on his warning "beware of updates to ES" does this mean it might stop working the next time we update ES? What it his code would cause this to happen"
3- my script might be better off with notes that tell the user to manually restart ES for the changes to take place.

Thank everyone

cyperghost

2- @cyperghost original script works - i am unclear on his warning "beware of updates to ES" does this mean it might stop working the next time we update ES? What it his code would cause this to happen"

The kill process identifies highest PID number only of any process that is called emulationstation
On future updates it may happen that there a new processes established maybe a video overlay or audio layer and this can also be called by emulationstation. And if you terminate that process then nothing happens. Okay not true, music is stopping or video stops playing ... but no restart is initiated! That is the warning it may not work in future updates of ES.

But I do not understand why the different scripts do not work. The main difference is see, that I used a sleeptimer between touch and kill and manually remove es-restart in /tmp

But the scripts from @meleu and @BuZz also work in my configuration.

the pkill command offers a parameter for display output: pkill -e -f "/opt.....
So you see what PID was killed.

meleu

@TMNTturtlguy looks like a problem on your script, because I tested my solution to restart ES using a script inside RetroPie Menu with only the command yo restart es and everything runs flawlessly several times in a row.

cyperghost

@meleu --- wrong ---
Sorry wrong issue

@TMNTturtlguy
But I also think that it has something to do with your script because all solutions posted by meleu, @BuZz and mine results in the same mechanism to kill one specific process.

Not more not less

meleu

@TMNTturtlguy @cyperghost prepare for another EUREKA moment. :-)

However I still have issue when pressing start to go to the menu and then to either restart ES or shudown system. In both cases it just flashing my script and then restarts ES. The only way to get rid of this is to Kill the highest number ES and sudo touch and then sudo rm /tmp/es-restart

That commit BuZz made on RetroPie-Setup was exactly to avoid this problem. But I think I've found the bug on your script...

Here is what is happening:

before that commit, the scripts launched via RetroPie menu were executed as root. Therefore the touch /tmp/es-restart/ was creating a file owned by root.
the emulationstation processes are all started by the pi user.
one of those emulationstation processes is a script responsible to rm /tmp/es-restart at some point, but as the script is being executed by the pi user, it can't remove a file owned by root, i.e. it fails to remove /tmp/es-restart.
emulationstation always restarts if there's a file named /tmp/es-restart, and as this file wasn't removed, emulationstation is always restarting on your tests.

What BuZz made in that commit was exactly make the scripts launched via RetroPie menu be executed by the pi user. But the @TMNTturtlguy 's script makes this fix ineffective because it's doing sudo touch /tmp/es-restart. This means that the /tmp/es-restart file will be owned by root and the problem I described above still happens.

Got it? :-)

By the way, @TMNTturtlguy I've submitted a PR to your little repository: https://github.com/TMNTturtleguy/change_es_systems/pull/1

cyperghost

@meleu .... So mine worked for him because I force remove es-restart via sudo

meleu

@cyperghost yep, but as you can see here in emulationstation.sh, removing the /tmp/es-restart shouldn't be a user's task.

That emulationstation.sh is the piece of code responsible to manage what happens with the user's choice on ES Quit menu (restart ES, quit ES, restart system, shutdown system).

TMNTturtlguy

@meleu thanks so much! Gotta get the kids to daycare, will test out in about 45 minutes.

cyperghost

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

@cyperghost yep, but as you can see here in emulationstation.sh, removing the /tmp/es-restart shouldn't be a user's task.

That emulationstation.sh is the piece of code responsible to manage what happens with the user's choice on ES Quit menu (restart ES, quit ES, restart system, shutdown system).

EUREKA

TMNTturtlguy

@meleu I merged your changes and loaded into my pi, the script fails t launch. I noticed a few things:

the menu dialog functions were not present
the script that was on github was not updated to reflect the permission changes per the retropie setup script changes. sudo needs to be added in front of the rm and cp commands now. I hadn't updated because that was the last working script using @cyperghost command.

I took your modifications and merged them with the dialog text and the sudo commands and i still get the same issue. When i go to the start menu, select quit, and then any function i see a flash of script and a restart. This newer code does not seem to change anything.

I have added a second branch, branch v2 to the github repository. github v2 If you and @cyperghost could look at the v2 script and possibly download it and try to run it from the retropie menu that would be great.

Thank you both for your time and help.

meleu

@TMNTturtlguy I will only have a chance to look at it tomorrow... But I'll try. Cheers!

TMNTturtlguy

@meleu Not a problem! No rush, I appreciate all the help. Thanks

cyperghost

@TMNTturtlguy I think first @meleu should take a look on your script. If there are still issues with it then I build a "restart binary" based on my script but that will analyze processes and kills always the right one ... so there are no future issue okay?

But I think Master meleu finds an easy solution....

TMNTturtlguy

@cyperghost i agree! I appreciate both of your guys help. In the mean time i will keep tinkering with it and the script works fine without the auto restart function. You just have to manually restart, so for the time being I can still accomplish what I want.

meleu

@TMNTturtlguy out of curiosity: you need a keyboard to choose an option on your script, right? Or is it able to get input from joystick?

TMNTturtlguy

@meleu the way it is written now it works from joystick/controller. The whole point is that i want to be able to make the ES changes without a keyboard. It works great right now with joystick and ps4 controller, less the restart issues. Thanks

meleu

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

@meleu the way it is written now it works from joystick/controller.

This is curious. I can't see any mention to joy2key in your script. And joy2key is the tool responsible to convert the up/down/left/right on d-pad to up/down/left/right key presses (and A button to <enter>).

Can you confirm that you navigate through your dialog menu using the up/down in your joystick and select an option with the button A?

cyperghost

@meleu
Yes It's working with D-Pad A and B
even this minimal menu works

#!/bin/bash
# Bash Menu Script Example

dialog --clear --backtitle "Backtitle here" --title "Title here" --menu "Choose one of the following options:" 15 40 4 \
1 "Option 1" \
2 "Option 2" \
3 "Option 3"

cyperghost

@meleu @TMNTturtlguy @BuZz Man I'm so ....
pkill -n emulationstatio always kills the newest process that the short version what my script exactly does. With all advantages and disadvantages - but the shortest script ;)

I should more RTFM