eddrobinson.net

It would be slightly more useful if when I hit the play/pause button on my keyboard and rhythmbox wasn’t open it would open up for me.  I first tried to do the obvious and set the same key to open my media player and play/pause in the Gnome keyboard shortcuts app.  Computer says no.  I then remembered that compiz will let you run arbitrary commands from keyboard shortcuts, so I just needed to work out exactly what command I wanted to run to get this done…

A bash script seemed like the most obvious solution.  In the end I came up with the following:

#!/bin/sh
#rhythmScript.sh
app='rhythmbox'

if ! (ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $app > /dev/null)
then
    rhythmbox &
else
    rhythmbox-client --play-pause
fi

First, it looks to see if any process with the name ‘rhythmbox’ is running.  If no process is running it launches it, otherwise it toggles play/pause on rhythmbox.  Note the grep -v, this is needed else the grep rhythmbox process will get returned and screw my if statement up.  Save the script, make it executable and then add it as a command in compiz-settings associated with the key of your choice.