Support setproctitle on Mac OS X [was: Question: Any way for a shell script to check if youtube-dl is running?]

[Wowfunhappy]

Hello, I've created an Applescript for personal use that works as a sort of wrapper around youtube-dl so I can download multiple videos quickly. I'm trying to modify it so that it won't download multiple videos at the same time.

In order to accomplish this, I need to check to see if the youtube-dl process is already running (and if so, wait until it finishes. I'm currently accomplishing this with the following shell script:
ps -ax -o etime,command -c | grep python
Which will return the empty string if python is not running. Since youtube-dl uses python, this can be used to approximate whether youtube-dl itself is running.

Of course, however, this causes problems if I run a program other than youtube-dl which depends on Python. Is there any way to check if youtube-dl itself is currently running? Thank you so much!

[dstftw]

Just don't run it in background and you won't have this problem at all.

[Wowfunhappy]

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand. I'm not doing anything special to make youtube-dl run in the background. Is there something specific I need to do to make sure it runs in the foreground?

[dstftw]

Post your code.

[Wowfunhappy]

First, I check if youtube-dl is already running (by checking if python is running—if I check for youtube-dl directly, it will never be reported as running):

repeat while (do shell script "ps -ax -o etime,command -c | grep python; exit 0") is not equal to ""
    delay 5
end repeat

Then, I start the download:

do shell script "cd " & theFolder & "; " & YoutubeDL & " -f bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a] --no-playlist --include-ads --ffmpeg-location ../  -o '%(autonumber)s.mp4' '" & theURL & "'"

theFolder has been set to my working directory and YoutubeDL has been set to the path to the youtube-dl executable. The actual terminal command that gets executed is:

cd '/Applications/Video Downloader.app/Downloading....app/1456888872.674809.tmp'; '/Applications/Video Downloader.app/Downloading....app/youtube-dl' -f bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a] --no-playlist --include-ads --ffmpeg-location ../  -o '%(autonumber)s.mp4' 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4C_wDRbatM'

I run multiple of these in parallel, which is where the first piece of code (Is youtube-dl running already?) comes into play.

Here is the full program, I'm not 100% sure what you need to see.

[smitelli]

Sounds to me like your script should create, check, and manage its own pidfile/lockfile. That is, instead of checking whether another instance of youtube-dl was running, it would instead check to see if another instance of itself was running and block until that was no longer true.

[yan12125]

As you're writing Applescript, I guess you're using Mac OS X. On Llinux setproctitle enables the following usage:

$ pgrep youtube-dl
13507

Currently this feature supports "normal" Linuxes only. py-setproctitle can be a good reference if we're going to implement it on more systems.