[Pan-users] Re: Two instances of PAN-a couple of glitches

[Duncan]

Rick Barry <address@hidden>
posted address@hidden, excerpted below, on 
Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:48:21 -0800:

> Server settings and posting profiles were fine, even all the messages in
> the subscribed groups remained, just not their state, (read, unread
> etc). The subscribed groups and message "memory" are not retained when I
> close PAN, all groups are lost and I was unable to get PAN to connect
> after a couple of lauches to get the list of groups again.

I've seen other reports of this, but have not been able to duplicate the 
problem here.  The one possibility I can think of is that permissions are 
wrong, and the new files aren't saving.

Do this from a terminal window and post the results of the ls and umask 
commands.  If it's permissions, this should reveal the problem.  Then we 
just have to figure out how to fix it. =:^)

cd
ls -l $(which pan) pan pan/giga
umask -S

> The other perplexing glitch: I open a terminal and type pan.giga, it
> launches but then the process appears to "own" the terminal. No other
> commands, though they can be typed in, will work. There is no prompt
> after launching the first instance of PAN. Closing the terminal window
> also closes the instance of PAN I have open at the moment. If I close
> PAN without closing the terminal window, I then get my prompt back and
> can launch the other instance of PAN or whatever else I want to do in
> the terminal. Perhaps an idiosyncrasy of Ubuntu? Or should I have done
> something else in .bashrc? There was no PATH command in the file, so I
> added it as suggested in your instructional,
> (PATH="$PATH:/home/rick/bin")

As David mentioned, you can run it with an & to put it in the background, 
like so:

pan.giga &

Or, perhaps better, edit the exec line of each of the two scripts as 
follows (deleting the exec and adding the &):

pan $* &

Note that either of the above will still cause pan to close if you close 
the terminal window.  To prevent that, either type into the terminal 
window or add to the bottom of the script the following command:

disown

You should then be able to close the terminal window without triggering 
pan to close as well.

One final note: If pan produces any output on STDOUT/STDERR (basically, 
if it produces any debugging output), it will appear in the terminal 
window you launched it from.  This can sometimes be confusing or 
frustrating if you're doing something else in the window at the time.  If 
this is a problem for you, since you've disowned the pan process you can 
close the terminal window now, and it may be useful to do so and open a 
new one to do any other terminal stuff in.

BTW, you can use the & and disown tricks for other programs run at the 
command prompt too, if you need to.  They can be quite useful at times. 

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman