Live UI feedback in a "sleep timer" bash script for PocketBook

[flx]

Hi,

I am trying to code my very first PocketBook bash script. I wanted a little tool to send the device to "sleep" (which is no real sleep, but a simple reboot) after a certain amount of time (so that I could e.g. listen to audiobooks and the playback would be stopped at some point automatically).

This is what I came up with so far:

#!/bin/sh

SH_IVTOOL=/mnt/ext1/applications/sh_ivtool.app

sleep_time=`$SH_IVTOOL -n "Enter sleep in time in mins (or leave empty to cancel):"`
# workaround to strip away trailing "latinime: Loading /ebrmain/share/latinime//EN.dict" string
sleep_time=${sleep_time:51}

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
	while [[ $sleep_time -ne 0 ]]; do
		sleep 60
		sleep_time=$((sleep_time-1))
	done
	iv2sh reboot
fi

exit 0

So far this works on my PB Verse Pro. To make it a bit prettier, I was wondering if I could show the minutes left until the device goes to sleep on the screen (and, ideally, add some extend and cancel button). I suppose a bash script is not really supposed for this kind of work, but I will most certainly not start to learn C for this

I tried to do something like this in the loop, but it did not seem to work stably:

	while [[ $sleep_time -ne 0 ]]; do
		$SH_IVTOOL -s "Will go to sleep in $sleep_time mins $pid" &
		pid=$!
		sleep 2 # 2 seconds for testing purposes
		iv2sh SendEventTo -9 "$pid"
		sleep_time=$((sleep_time-1))
	done

Do you have any other ideas?

[rkomar]

What was the behaviour of your script? It is hard to know what part needs fixing without details.

[flx]

Right now it works, but it misses the capability to display how much time is left until the device reboots.

When I tried to display the dialogs in the while loop, they did not refresh consistently (sometimes they did, sometimes they did not and the script waited until the dialog button was pressed until the display refreshed again).

[rkomar]

Updating the display can be complicated because a process seems to need to be the active task to do that. Perhaps one of the other processes messes with that while your script is running. I expect it will get even worse when you run the process to listen to an audiobook simultaneously. Anyway, maybe you can figure it out using iv2sh to set the active task manually, but I have my doubts about that.

[flx]

Is there any documentation for all those binaries like iv2sh or dialog or run_script, etc. anyway?

[rkomar]

I doubt it. They were put there by pocketbook for their own purposes, and I doubt they expected them to be used generally. That said, "iv2sh -h" shows some help information, so there is that.

[orontee]

dialog ICON_CODE UNUSED_TITLE MESSAGE [BUTTON_ONE_LABEL] [BUTTON_TWO_LABEL]

Meaning of ICON_CODE: 0 no icon, 1 information icon, 2 question mark icon, 3 warning icon, 4 error icon.

AFAICT UNUSED_TITLE is... unused, just use "".

Button labels are optional.

Exit status will tell what button was selected by user.

Example:

dialog 3 "" "Is flx listening to an audiobook or looking at hisereader screen" "Reading" "Don't know"