How to manually finish TagUI integrations processes? (eg if Ctrl+C was used to kill TagUI prematurely)

[kensoh]

user query

[kensoh]

TagUI will by default send 'finish' signals to its integrations processes automatically (eg Chrome, Python, R, SikuliX). This happens even if errors are encountered during execution, as the cleaning up is done outside the main execution engine, for robustness and reliability.

However, if a user for some reason use Ctrl+C to kill TagUI prematurely, there is no chance for TagUI to send those 'finish' signals to end its integrations processes, as OS will terminate TagUI right away. In this case, users may use the following scripts to terminate the running integration processes.

Without doing so, example of a known side effect (raised in #412) is a SikuliX process when not exit properly, will interfere with execution for the next visual automation script, as there are 2 SikuliX processes running and thus actions are acted out twice (for eg typing text to screen).

This is an uncommon use case, thus it does not make sense to implement as part of main engine. Because it will require adding some delay for each execution for 'finish' signals to be processed. This will slow down execution of all TagUI scripts for the benefit of such edge use case. Thus the following scripts may be used for this purpose.

Note - to rely on programmatically finding the process IDs and killing them is a possible solution but not reliable (for eg, if there are more than 1 existing lost process). And it adds potential failure arcs during executions due to reliance on more OS-level commands. Thus below scripts are the recommended solutions for the use case where users manually terminate TagUI with Ctrl+C.

macOS / Linux - eg end_processes

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# TO KILL INTEGRATION PROCESSES IF CTRL+C WAS USED TO QUIT TAGUI PREMATURELY ~ TEBEL.ORG #

# checking for existence of files before sending finish signal is important
# otherwise for ongoing tagui iterations, all integrations will be invoked

if [ -f "tagui_r/tagui_r.in" ]; then echo "finish" > tagui_r/tagui_r.in; fi
if [ -f "tagui_py/tagui_py.in" ]; then echo "finish" > tagui_py/tagui_py.in; fi
if [ -f "tagui.sikuli/tagui_sikuli.in" ]; then echo "finish" > tagui.sikuli/tagui_sikuli.in; fi
if [ -f "tagui_chrome.in" ]; then echo "finish" > tagui_chrome.in; fi

Windows - eg end_processes.cmd

@echo off
rem # TO KILL INTEGRATION PROCESSES IF CTRL+C WAS USED TO QUIT TAGUI PREMATURELY ~ TEBEL.ORG #

rem checking for existence of files before sending finish signal is important
rem otherwise for ongoing tagui iterations, all integrations will be invoked

if exist "tagui_r\tagui_r.in" echo finish > tagui_r\tagui_r.in
if exist "tagui_py\tagui_py.in" echo finish > tagui_py\tagui_py.in
if exist "tagui.sikuli\tagui_sikuli.in" echo finish > tagui.sikuli\tagui_sikuli.in
if exist "tagui_chrome.in" echo finish > tagui_chrome.in

[kensoh]

Committed to master. Prior to packaged release, feature available from cutting edge version here -

https://github.com/kelaberetiv/TagUI#set-up