Can a watir browser object be re-used in a later Ruby process?

Question

So let\'s say pretty often a script runs that opens a browser and does web things:

require \'watir-webdriver\'

$browser = Watir::Browser.new(:firefox, :prof         


        

Answer 1

Not so much a solution but a workaround for part 1 of my question, using pkill. Posting here since it turned out to be a lot less trivial than I had hoped.

After the ruby script exits, its spawned processes (which may not at all belong in the same PID tree anymore, like firefox-bin) have a predictable "session leader" which turned out to be the parent of the bash shell calling rubyprogram.rb in my case. Available as $PPID in Bash, for when you have to go higher than $$.

Thus to really clean up unwanted heavyweight processes eg. after a ruby crash:

#!/bin/bash
# This is the script that wraps on top of Ruby scripts

./ruby_program_using_watirwebdriver_browser.rb  myparams &  # spawn ruby in background but keep going below:

sleep 11 # give Ruby a chance to launch its web browser

pstree -panu $$  # prints out a process tree starting under Bash, the parent of Ruby. Firefox may not show!

wait  # now wait for Ruby to exit or crash

pkill -s $PPID firefox-bin  # should only kill firefox-bin's caused above, not elsewhere on the system

# Another way without pkill, will also print out what's getting killed if anything:
awk '$7=="firefox-bin" && $3=="'$PPID'" {print $1}' <(ps x -o pid,pgid,sess,ppid,tty,time,comm) | xargs -rt kill

OPTIONAL And since I use a dedicated Xvfb Xwindows server just for webdriving on DISPLAY :99, I can also count on xkill:

timeout 1s  xwininfo -display :99 -root -all |awk '/("Navigator" "Firefox")/ {print $1}' |xargs -rt  xkill -display :99 -id  
# the timeout is in case xkill decides to wait for user action, when window id was missing