How to check in Makefile if some program is running ?

27th Apr 2014 Tags: #bash #convert #libreoffice #makefile

I write my university lections in LyX and draw diagrams in LibreOffice Draw. So, one day I decided to write a Makefile to covert a batch of odg-diagrams to pdf. You may ask me: what is the problem? Well... you can convert odg to pdf in may ways:

libreoffice --convert-to pdf
cups-printer
unoconv

I choose an easiest one:

$ libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf "file.odg"

It works fine until... there is no other LO instances. There is a workaround to fix it, but I decide just to check in Makefile, if any LO instance is running now, and exit if any.

My resulting Makefile looks like:

SOURCES = $(wildcard *.odg)
TARGETS = $(SOURCES:.odg=.pdf)

LIBREOFFICE_PID = $(shell pidof soffice.bin)

%.pdf:%.odg

ifneq ("", "$(LIBREOFFICE_PID)")
  $(error "Please, close all LibreOffice instances ($(LIBREOFFICE_PID)) to continue")
endif
  libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf "$^"

all: $(TARGETS)

clean:
  rm -f $(TARGETS)

How to check in Makefile if some program is running ?

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