🚀 go-pugleaf

Here's how we've solved the problem around here: For startup, 
the .login plays around with $TERM and a few other things to 
guess what you're on (a type of workstation or an X terminal).  
To start on an X terminal, my script does a "sh .xinitrc" to start 
up the same processes I run in a workstation environment, but 
different people do different things.

The shutdown problem is worse than you thought...  killpg will 
*not* kill all of your clients in a heterogeneous environment, as 
everything displaying on the same screen is not necessarily 
running on the same machine.  (And frequently isn't around here!)  
Moreover, even if you are only using one machine to start all of 
your clients from, they are not always all in the same process group.

I've developed a "shutdown" program which basically walks through 
the window tree shutting down clients.  It identifies application 
top-level windows by looking for the WM_STATE variable, then checks 
WM_PROTOCOLS.  If the client supports WM_DELETE_WINDOW, I send that 
message.  Otherwise, I do an XKillClient on it.  (I have an error 
handler catch me if an application has multiple windows and I try to
kill it twice.)  I sleep for a while, then walk through again, doing 
an XKillClient on anything still surviving.  (The second pass doesn't 
seem to get executed when the window manager is twm, but seems to be 
necessary to kill swm when I use that window manager.)

I've tried to follow ICCCM standards, but I'm not sure whether this
is really a "nice" application to have around.  I can send you a 
copy if you are interested in looking at it.

--Janet

Janet L. Carson                               internet: jcarson@bcm.tmc.edu 
Baylor College of Medicine              uucp: {rutgers,mailrus}!bcm!jcarson