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Class Process ​

Process management.

This module provides utilities to spawn processes and capture their output.

Functions ​

function spawn ​

function Process.spawn(args: string | string[], callbacks?: { stdout: fun(line: string), stderr: fun(line: string), exit: fun(code: integer, msg: string) })

Spawn a program with optional callbacks for its stdout, stderr, and exit information.

callbacks is an optional table with the following optional fields:

  • stdout: function(line: string)
  • stderr: function(line: string)
  • exit: function(code: integer, msg: string)

Note: if args is a string then it will be wrapped in a table and sent to the compositor. If you need multiple arguments, use a string array instead.

Note 2: If you spawn a window before tags are added it will spawn without any tags and won't be displayed in the compositor. TODO: Do what awesome does and display on all tags instead

Example ​

lua
Process.spawn("alacritty")

 -- With a table of arguments
Process.spawn({ "bash", "-c", "echo hello" })

 -- With callbacks
Process.spawn("alacritty", {
    stdout = function(line)
        print(line)
    end,
    -- You can ignore callbacks you don't need
    exit = function(code, msg)
        print("exited with code", code)
        print("exited with msg", msg)
    end,
})

Parameters ​

args: string | string[] - The program arguments; a string instead of an array should be for only 1 argument
callbacks?: { stdout: fun(line: string), stderr: fun(line: string), exit: fun(code: integer, msg: string) } - Callbacks that will be run whenever the program outputs to stdout, stderr, or exits.

function spawn_once ​

function Process.spawn_once(args: string | string[], callbacks?: { stdout: fun(line: string), stderr: fun(line: string), exit: fun(code: integer, msg: string) })

Like Process.spawn but will only spawn the program if it isn't already running.

Parameters ​

args: string | string[]
callbacks?: { stdout: fun(line: string), stderr: fun(line: string), exit: fun(code: integer, msg: string) }

See also ​

function set_env ​

function Process.set_env(key: string, value: string)

Set an environment variable for the compositor. This will cause any future spawned processes to have this environment variable.

Example ​

lua
Process.set_env("ENV_NAME", "the value")

Parameters ​

key: string - The environment variable key
value: string - The environment variable value