GUI to run a task as a background process and display the output
taskmonitor "task to execute"
Taskmonitor is a graphical user interface (GUI) intended to allow another GUI
application to run a task in the
background but still display the standard error and standard output.
Although designed to be launched from toolagent, it may be
invoked from the command line and used as a stand-alone tool.
Taskmonitor takes a command to execute as input. Commands which contain
white space or more than a single word must be enclosed in quotes. It
executes the task as a background process and pipes the standard error
and standard output of the task to a scrollable text window in the GUI.
Since the task is run as a background process, there is no way for user
input to be entered and thus should not be used to execute interactive
programs. This means that CIAO tools may need to be run with
"mode=h" set to avoid prompts for parameter values, as discussed in the
examples below.
Taskmonitor acts as a "dumb" terminal, which may influence the output
of the program it is given to run.
Taskmonitor does not utilize a parameter file itself, but loads in the
session parameter file ciao.par when it starts.
The taskmonitor layout contains three menus,
two scrollable windows and a set of
informational/control buttons.
The menus allow users to print out the output from the tool, save
the output to a text file, search in the output, run other tools
(via the analysis menu), and exit the GUI.
The top window contains the command which taskmonitor is
running. Under that is a scrollable window which displays the executing
tasks stderr and stdout.
The final part of the display is the "Status" field, which
reports on the state of the tool (is it running or has it finished?),
and a set of buttons - "Find", "Print", "Save As", and "Exit -
which mirror the functions available in the menu bar.
The "Analysis" menu item was added to taskmonitor in CIAO 3.0
and allows the user to run other tools (both command-line and GUI).
The contents of this menu are user configurable and is
described further in "ahelp analysis-menu".
This example illustrates how taskmonitor may be used to execute a simple
command and display the output. Since the command was a single word, quotes
around the command are unnecessary.
taskmonitor "dmlist mydata.fits opt=header,subspace mode=h" &
This example launches taskmonitor to run dmlist and display the
header and subspace information for the file mydata.fits. By setting the mode
parameter to 'h', the parameter interface's querying of auto-params is
disabled, allowing parameter driven tools to be executed in a
non-interactive mode. The & puts the taskmonitor process into the
background to free up the shell it was invoked from so the user may perform
other commands. Since the command to execute contained whitespace characters,
the entire command was enclosed in quotes.
taskmonitor "dmstat 'evt2.fits[sky=region(ds9.reg)][cols energy]' sig-"
&
Here we run dmstat on a filtered events file - restricting the calculation to
only the energy column - and set the sigma parameter
to no.
The first parameter (infile) is quoted because it contains a space and
note that we can still use shortcuts like "sig-" provided by the
parameter library (see "ahelp parameter").
Since dmstat ha only one automatic parameter, and this is specified in the
command string, we did not need to set
mode=h to stop for prompting of other parameter values.
taskmonitor "ahelp -b PARAM dmstat" &
Here we run the ahelp tool to display just the PARAMETER section
of the dmstat ahelp file. Since taskmonitor acts like a dumb terminal
there is no ability to control the output as there is at the
command line, although you can use the scroll bar to view all the
text.
taskmonitor "ahelp -n 130 -b QEXAMPLELIST aconvolve" &
Similar to the previous example but this time we pass several
options to the ahelp command.
When the program which taskmonitor is running has finished
the "Status" field will now report either
if the program ran successfully or
if the program failed (the "exit status" value need not be 1).
The default font used by taskmonitor - as specified by
the "taskmonitor*fontlist" line in the file
$ASCDS_INSTALL/config/system/CXCdefaults - has been changed
to use a fixed-width font.
This means that output from programs which use spaces
for alignment - such as the output of ahelp - will be
readable.
To change the font used by taskmonitor, create (or
update) a file called .CXCdefaults in your home directory
and include in it the following line
taskmonitor*fontList: -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal-*-12-*-*
The text to the right of the ":" defines the font to use:
in the example above we show the value used in CIAO 3.0.2;
previous versions of CIAO used
-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal-*-12-*-*
and the "xfontsel" program can be used to select other
choices.
See "ahelp gui" for more information on how to configure
the appearance of CIAO GUIs.
Prior to CIAO 3.0.2, passing command-line arguments to a
task using taskmonitor on Linux - such as
unix% taskmonitor "ahelp -n 100 -b PARAM acis_process_events"
- would report an error message from
the "getopt" command and the command not
executing correctly.
The "Analysis" menu is a user-confurable set of commands that can
be called from the GUI. See "ahelp analysis-menu" for more
information.
Taskmonitor now allows user's to search for a word or
phrase in the output text of a command using either
the "Find" item in the "Edit" menu or the "Find"
button at the bottom of the window.
The "Status" field now reports the exit status
of a tool (where 0 generally means successful completion
and non-zero an error occurred).
The default print and "Save As" options have been changed to include both the
command and the results text (prior to CIAO 3.0 it was just the
results text).
The title of the window has been changed from "TaskWindow" to
"TaskMonitor". The "Dismiss" button has been re-named "Exit" and
the "Save" button re-named to "Save As"
to match the look of other CIAO GUIs.
As with most of the CIAO GUIs, taskmonitor has an XPA access point which
can be used to control its behaviour: currently this is limited
to closing down the application.
See "ahelp session" for more information on how the CIAO GUIs use
XPA.
The default name is "taskmonitor", with further instances being called
"taskmonitor2", "taskmonitor3", ... (the "-xpa" command-line option can be used
to override this naming scheme).
Taskmonitor understands the following commands when sent via XPA:
unix% xpaget taskmonitor
exit: Exit the current application
options: None
quit: Synonym for "exit"
The Analysis menu can be configured using a simple text
file which uses the same format as the DS9 Analysis menu;
for more details see "ahelp analysis-menu".
Taskmonitor has several command-line options, although
they are not needed by most users:
| -iconic |
Starts taskmonitor in an iconified/hidden state, if allowed by the window manager. |
| -nosession |
Do not attatch this taskmonitor to the current CIAO session. |
| -toolmenu <file> |
Use <file> rather than the system default file for
defining the Analysis menu.
|
| -xpa <name> |
Sets the XPA access point of taskmonitor to <name>. |
|
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