Batch file

[Javier Revilla]

On Wed, 2011-06-29 at 11:05 -0500, Bill Stanley wrote:
> A friend of mine has a bad habit of opening too many instances of the firefox 
> browser.   I've told her that it is unnecessary to create a new instance when it 
> is easier and faster to just create a new tab.  She tries to open a tab instead 
> and likes it.  The problem is that it is an ingrained habit with her and she 
> reverts back to opening a new instance instead of opening a new tab.  As a 
> result, she often runs short on memory and the computer slows down when forced 
> to use swap memory.  (Her computer is a mid-aged laptop with the RAM maxed out 
> to 2 GBytes.)
> 
> That is the background.  A possible solution is to replace the launcher for 
> Firefox with a batch file (or script) which will launch Firefox after checking 
> if the Firefox program is running.  I envision a batch file (or script) that 
> would run ps to check if it firefox is a running process.  If it is a running 
> process, the batch file would ask if she really wants another instance of 
> firefox.  It seems like an easy thing to do.  (I often created old DOS batch 
> files and these should be very similar to Linux batch files (or scripts).  Any 
> ideas about better ways of doing this or suggestions on how to implement this?

Maybe you could tell her to do Ctrl-T instead of Ctrl-N ?

Javier