[Question] How to quit opened apps?

[sindresorhus]

[Question] How to quit opened apps?

[sindresorhus]

Yeah, currently not possible. I hadn't thought of that use-case.

How about this?

var close = opn('http://sindresorhus.com');

close();

Suggestions on a better API welcome.

[sbruchmann]

I tried to implement it by replacing execFile with spawn; Then I was able to kill the child process with signals (SIGINT, SIGTERM, …), but the actual application wasn’t terminated.

After a quick research, it looks like there’s no easy way to achieve this.

Leaving this open for further discussion.

[watson]

I've been toying with the same issue. How about allowing the user to provide a options hash with { wait: false } to override the default behaviour of waiting if opn is called with a callback?

In that case it should just call the callback once the child processes returns from opening the URL.

I can make a pull request if you'd like

[sindresorhus]

@watson 👍 Sounds like a better behaviour than the current way :)

[watson]

@sindresorhus Currently the api for the opn function is: opn(target, [app], [callback]). I think it would be too complicated to both understand and implement if we added an options hash between the app and the callback argument.

But since the app argument is seldom used, couldn't we then just make that part of the options hash? I.e. opn(target, [options], [callback]), where options have the following optional properties:

{
  app: "...", // default is platform dependent
  wait: false // default is true if a callback is also given
}

[watson]

That would of cause be a breaking change, which I would rather not introduce... but we could of cause detect if it was given a string and fall back to the old behaviour - or just bump the major version? Let me know what you think

[sindresorhus]

opn(target, [options], [callback]) looks good to me.

I'm fine with breaking backwards compat in a major as I doubt the app feature is used much.

[watson]

@sindresorhus ^ here you go - let me know what you think :)