Need a script or simple code string ....

[MkIII_Supra]

Here is what I am trying to accomplish. Since my grandma only connects the internet to check her e-mail I want to simplify the login and logout task.
She is using Earthlink as her ISP, I set up Kmail as her client (easiest I could find...) and she uses kppp to connect.

Now she can connect just fine and send and receive mail just fine. It's the disconnect that her and my wife are screwing up! And with me being 96 miles away it's kinda hard to fix the problem. Melinda knows enough Linux CLI to be dangerous even though she won't admit it. But not enough to fix her screw ups.

So what I am looking to create and configure is this.

One button that is clicked, this button will connect to the internet then open Kmail. Okay now I already have the button to connect to the internet and a separate button to open Kmail. Now that is half the dilemma. The other half is that when grandma exits Kmail I want the internet to automatically disconnect as well.

So one button to connect then open Kmail. Then on exit from Kmail disconnect the internet connection. I have been reading up on this but I can't seem to locate anything on combining 2 functions in KDE into one function then having an occurrence execute another or inverse function. Is this possible with a simple bash script or will I have to use pearl, if it's pearl then this will be fun!

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The Dragon is swift and powerful. Beware his wrath...
Honor your family and yourself. Speak not out of passion but out of wisdom and temper the fires of war that reside in you, and you shall then reach your full measure as a man of Honor, Courage and Integrity.
http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/MkIIISupra/ (http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/MkIIISupra)

[Strike]

You could run a crontab that would check every 5 minutes or so for a process named kmail, and if it isn't running, then you could call another script that would shut down the internet connection... just a thought.

[MkIII_Supra]

Sounds simple enough! I'll give that a try on my spare box and see if I can get it to work before I go up there this Saturday......

Thanks Strike, if I get stuck I'll drop you a note...

------------------
The Dragon is swift and powerful. Beware his wrath...
Honor your family and yourself. Speak not out of passion but out of wisdom and temper the fires of war that reside in you, and you shall then reach your full measure as a man of Honor, Courage and Integrity.
http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/MkIIISupra/ (http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/MkIIISupra)

[jemfinch]

You could also write a small shell script wrapper around kmail.


#!/bin/sh

connect_to_internet
kmail
disconnect_from_internet


When kmail exits, it'll automatically disconnect from the internet.

Jeremy

[Strike]

Wow, good idea. jemfinch's idea is better since there's never an interval to wait before you disconnect. You could also alias the current kmail call to that script instead (or you could rename the script to that and move the executable to another location and call it explicitly from the script). That way you wouldn't have to change too much.

[DesertWolf]

Another option would be to have fetchmail check the mail account when the pppd is run then when the mail is finished downloading disconnect the pppd.

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Once you learn something, it can never be taken away.