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I want to write a script to display a message and possibly cancel a logout from an interactive shell. This is because I often run background jobs in some of my shells and in the spur of the moment I logout from all, closing the running jobs. What I'm after is a script like:

# If there are running jobs
if [ -z "$(jobs)" ]; then
    # Display messages, give choices, etc.
    ...code...
    # And finally, given some conditions (e.g. answers to questions, etc.)
    cancel_logout
else
    logout

Presumably, the above would go into ~/.bash_logout.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

The proper way to do this is to have bash perform the check itself

shopt -s checkjobs

This will make bash display a notice if any jobs are left running. If there are jobs running you have to try and exit twice to actually exit.

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  • This does almost exactly what I need. One point is that it only seems to remind me once, e.g. remind, process some commands, don't remind next time. But it might be a timeout thing. Also, is there something that would work with OSX as well? Commented Mar 19, 2012 at 21:31
  • @WojtekRzepala I would guess its a bug in bash. The documentation very clearly states multiple times that you must try to exit twice without any commands issued between the exit attempts (I get the same - apparently buggy - behavior). Commented Mar 19, 2012 at 23:16

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