Same concept as --bind but for UNIX signals

[edi9999]

• I have read through the manual page (man fzf)
• I have the latest version of fzf
• I have searched through the existing issues

Info

• OS
  • Linux
  • [] Mac OS X
  • Windows
  • Etc.
• Shell
  • bash
  • zsh
  • fish

Problem / Steps to reproduce

This is a bit similar as what is described in #1789, so maybe it still does not make sense to handle signals as events.

I use fzf for multiple cases, and in one particular usecase, I am using fzf on some json data that comes from a given file, which contains an array of items.

Since this data takes some time to refresh from its "production" source, I actually use a cached version of the data for the fzf script which is present on my local machine.

However, in parallel, when the script runs, I also do a refresh of the data so that the data is uptodate when I run the script the next time.

Refreshing the data and then running fzf would add some seconds of delay (approximately 5 probably), and since I use that command quite often, I think it makes sense to do both steps in parallel.

Now the problem I have is that quite often, I'm interested in the updated data, and since it doesn't show the uptodate version at first, it means that I usually start the script once and then again because my cached version is too much outdated.

I would find it cool to have the possibility to tell

My current script :

get_data() {
  jq '.[] | .name + " " + .version' <~/tmp/data.json
}
update_data() {
   # some refreshing command with curl that updates ~/tmp/data.json
}
update_data &
get_data | fzf

What I would like to have :

get_data() {
  jq '.[] | .name + " " + .version' <~/tmp/data.json
}
update_data() {
   # some refreshing command with curl
   kill -SIGUSR1 "$fzf_pid"
}
update_data &
fzf < <(get_data) --bind 'sigusr1:reload'  &
fzf_pid="$!"
wait "$fzf_pid"

[doronbehar]

I'd also be interested in such a feature. I'd like to make an already running fzf session reload data when an external program does something - I'd like the external program to tell fzf to reload the list. (I came to search for such an issue after trying to solve this and this).

[edi9999]

Hello @junegunn ,

I have a usecase where I would like to reopen this issue.
My usecase is running some unit test in watch mode and piping it to fzf (this is a custom script that gets a lot of different information).

What I would like to do is that between each run, I would like to reload the data.

Currently, I need to relaunch the script (and the fzf instance) if I want to be able to see results only of the latest test.

I could send a unix signal to fzf to tell it to reload the data.

[edi9999]

Hello @junegunn,

I'm pinging you back on this because I can see a pattern in many of my fzf scripts where fetching the data to fzf would take some time (3-10 seconds), and I prefer to have an fzf instance running with the cached data during the download.

What I do is the following :

• fetch the new data in the background
• use fzf on the cached data
• when seeing the data, decide whether I should reload fzf using the new data or not.

I would still find it very cool to be able, after the async fetching of data is done, to send a signal to the fzf instance to reload the data from the cache.

[junegunn]

Please take a look at #3094.