Lack of _fg option?

[Les Aker]

The switch from pbs to sh seems to have removed the _fg option. I've scanned the documentation and can't see a recommended solution for throwing commands to the foreground. I find this useful if I'm running an intense command and want to watch its output. What's the recommended fix for this?

For completeness, I'm specifically using _fg from pbs for the following:

• make menuconfig on Linux kernels
• tar extractions for those tarballs
• wget for lurking the downloads of those tarballs
• make for making those kernels

[Andrew]

It's on the agenda to be re-implemented. sh 1.0 had a complete rewrite of the core architecture...and unfortunately _fg hasn't yet made it back into 1.0. Your best bet for now is going to be to stick with pbs, at least for the commands that require _fg. You can use sh for everything else if you wish.

Let's leave this issue open too to remind me to add it back :)

[Les Aker]

Awesome!

[Simon Mutch]

+1 for this being reimplemented. I was just wondering is there was an updated eta? I'm using pbs just now to have _fg support, but it would be nice to move to over to sh...

[Daniel Johansson]

The _fg feature would be great. I'm too using pbs ans sh together just for this reason.

[Andrew]

I'm pretty busy for the holidays, but if another contributor can get to it, I'll merge.

[Alexander Ljungberg]

+1

[Shadab Zafar]

Could someone please tell me, where should I look (in the code) if I want to implement the feature myself?

[Andrew]

@dufferzafar take a good look at pexpect. use it a few times, then read the source code. once you understand the source code, it will be mostly straightforward to implement in sh

[Andrew]

do the os.spawn family of functions meet the needs of most people? i'm trying to understand the scope of _fg more. originally i was thinking _fg would work with existing options, like being able to feed input into the process via _in. if this is not necessary though, and people just want to be able to interact manually with a launched process, then the problem becomes much simpler. sh would just be an easier interface to os.spawn

[noisygecko]

While I would love to see the _fg option added for when I want to interact with the process, it would also be nice to have an option to at least print the output to the screen when running a command. It is tedious to have to use the _iter option and then print out line by line.

[Andrew]

@noisygecko are you imagining it kind of like how a bash script currently behaves? could you elaborate on it in a new issue?

[noisygecko]

I just mean something like:

for line in sh.tar('xvf', 'stuff.tgz', _iter=True):
    print line,

being handled like this:

sh.tar('xvf', 'stuff.tgz', _print=True)

[Andrew]

@noisygecko want to make a new issue for it? posting on this issue notifies everyone who has replied, and this request doesn't pertain to _fg

[Lele Gaifax]

Is there a workaround to the lack of _fg that would allow executing a fullscreen tool like vi? It works out-of-the-box with the release-1.2 branch _fg... any chance to see that released?

[Andrew]

@lelit Unfortunately development on the next release has stagnated a bit and I don't have a timeline. Your best bet would be to do what sh is doing under the hood for fg:

import os
vi_path = "/usr/bin/vi"
os.spawnv(os.P_WAIT, vi_path, [vi_path])