Linux, programming, computers and life

While in ArchLinux it’s extremely easy to build packages from source using ABS, i had a little problem while trying to build mplayer with fribidi support.
Obviously, i added --with-fribidi-config=/usr/bin/fribidi-config --enable-fribidi to the PKGBUILD, but it did not help. So, after some googling i found out there’s a small error in the mplayer configure script. It must be changed a little in order to allow fribidi. The change can be done this way in the PKGBUILD:

sed -i ’s/FRIBIDI_CHARSET_UTF8/FRIBIDI_CHAR_SET_UTF8/g’ configure
CFLAGS= ./configure –prefix=/usr –enable-gui –disable-arts –enable-x11 –disable-sgiaudio ….

Just add the bold line, make sure you add all the configure flags you need, and you are done.

mplayer, fribidi, archlinux

While Linux certainly has it own problems… here’s a little story.
A friend, not a programmer, asked me to write a batch file which will run a certain program, wait for an hour and then kill it.
In Linux, something like:

$PROG & sleep 1h ; kill $!

Will probably work (PROG is a variable with a program name). On Windows, after some googling i came up with this:

SET KILL=%WINDIR%\system32\taskkill
start %PROGPATH%/%PROGNAME%
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w %SLEEPMSEC% >NUL
%KILL% /IM %PROGNAME%

Note that “sleep” is implemented with ping - which is great idea (not mine). There’s major drawback here - all the instances of the certain program probably will be killed.

You tell me which is simpler….

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