181416 - "mozilla -remote ping()" isn't very programmatically useful

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: X-remote, enhancement)

Description

[Doug Renner]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021120
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021120

"/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla -remote "ping()" | grep -c No" will always return 0
even when it's output includes "No".

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.start mozilla; run"/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla -remote "ping()" | grep -c"
result will be 0
2.Kill mozilla; run"/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla -remote "ping()" | grep -c"
result will  still be 0
3.



Expected Results:  
I belive the "ping()" command should at least take an arguement (e.g. "num")
that will return a 0/1 boolean to STDOUT that will more programmatically accessable.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

.

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

1)  The text is printed to stderr

2)  As all test-like programs do, mozilla -remote returns a 0 on success (mozilla
    found), nonzero otherwise.  So you can do:

mozilla -remote "ping()" && echo "mozilla running";

mozilla -remote "ping()" || echo "mozilla not running";

if mozilla -remote "ping()"; then
 # do something here
fi