Awesome WM - os.execute vs afwul.spawn

问题

I was wondering if there are any difference between lua's

os.execute('<command>')

and awesome's

awful.spawn('<command>')

I noticed that lain suggests to use os.execute, is there any reason for that, or it's a matter of personal taste?

回答1:

Do not ever use os.execute or io.popen. They are blocking functions and cause very bad performance and noticeable increase in input (mouse/keyboard) and client repaint latency. Using these functions is an anti-pattern and will only make everything worst.

See the warning in the documentation https://awesomewm.org/apidoc/libraries/awful.spawn.html

Now to really answer the question, you have to understand that Awesome is single threaded. It means it only does a single thing at a time. If you call os.execute("sleep 10"), your mouse will keep moving but your computer will otherwise be frozen for 10 seconds. For commands that execute fast enough, it may be possible to miss this, but keep in mind that due to the latency/frequency rules, any command that takes 33 millisecond to execute will drop up to 2 frames in a 60fps video game (and will at least drop one). If you have many commands per second, they add up and wreck your system performance.

But Awesome isn't doomed to be slow. It may not have multiple threads, but it has something called coroutine and also have callbacks. This means things that take time to execute can still do so in the background (using C threads or external process + sockets). When they are done, they can notify the Awesome thread. This works perfectly and avoid blocking Awesome.

Now this brings us to the next part. If I do:

-- Do **NOT** do this.
os.execute("sleep 1; echo foo > /tmp/foo.txt")
mylabel.text = io.popen("cat /tmp/foo.txt"):read("*all*")

The label will display foo. But If I do:

-- Assumes /tmp/foo.txt does not exist
awful.spawn.with_shell("sleep 1; echo foo > /tmp/foo.txt")
mylabel.text = io.popen("cat /tmp/foo.txt"):read("*all*")

Then the label will be empty. awful.spawn and awful.spawn.with_shell will not block and thus the io.popen will be execute wayyy before sleep 1 finishes. This is why we have async functions to execute shell commands. There is many variants with difference characteristics and complexity. awful.spawn.easy_async is the most common as it is good enough for the general "I want to execute a command and do something with the output when it finishes".

awful.spawn.easy_async_with_shell("sleep 1; echo foo > /tmp/foo.txt", function()
    awful.spawn.easy_async_with_shell("cat /tmp/foo.txt", function(out)
        mylabel.text = out
    end)
end)

In this variant, Awesome will not block. Again, like other spawn, you cannot add code outside of the callback function to use the result of the command. The code will be executed before the command is finished so the result wont yet be available.

There is also something called coroutine that remove the need for callbacks, but it is currently hard to use within Awesome and would also be confusing to explain.

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52634985/awesome-wm-os-execute-vs-afwul-spawn

标签

awesome-wm