Send "F5" every 30 seconds

[Jon Munford]

Hey All, 

I need to loop the pressing of f5 every 30 seconds or so.  My understanding is that an AutoKey script is a one time run.  Is there a way to make it loop?

Thanks!

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[Steve Fisher]

Something like:

# Enter script code
a = 1
while a = 1
    keyboard.send_key("<f5>")
    time.sleep(30.0)

But..........  I have never got my machine to recognise the sending of a function key, e.g. f12 should call up guake but it doesn't

This script has no exit point, so you have to kill autokey to terminate.

Steve

[Joe]

What are you really trying to do? I ask because maybe you don't need AutoKey for it.

This is something I've read about, but not done.

(In what follows, substitute the name of your favorite scripting (or even compiled) language for "bash".)

I found:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/find-and-bind-key-sequences-in-bash/

which (among other things) tells you how to get the character sequence for a function key.

Maybe you could write a simple bash script that emits this character sequence at timed intervals. If you just want to affect what's running in a terminal, maybe this would take care of it.

If the F5 needs to go into a gui app, then that's a bit trickier. The tool for that is xdotool. You can tell xdotool to send most anything a keyboard (or mouse) can send and you can tell it what window to send it to.

http://linux-commands-examples.com/xdotool

This even has an example that finds the window and sends F5 to it. A pretty good start for you!

This can still all be done in bash. If it needs to be launched from a hotkey, then an AutoKey macro can use Python to launch your script in the background (so you can stop or kill it without killing AutoKey).

If you save the script's process ID to a file, you can use another script to kill it or kill it by name using pkill. Or you can just have the script look at a (semaphore) file (created when the script first gets invoked - either by the script or by the macro). If the file is there, keep running. If it's not, then exit. Then, you just need another script and/or macro to delete the file when you want the first script to quit.

Joe