uairctl listen prepends null terminators to every string except the first one

[ehula]

This is a great tool!

I am using it in my waybar, but I am having a problem. I would like to be able to kill waybar and still have uair running in the background, and when I start waybar, I would like to be able to connect to the running uair.

In waybar, if I use the following exec line:
exec = "uair";
then when I kill waybar, uair also is killed. Makes sense.

However, I tried this:
exec = "pgrep -x uair > /dev/null && uairctl listen || nohup uair &";
which I thought would do it, but not quite. When I kill waybar, uair is still running. That's great. I can see output from the terminal using uairctl listen. However, when I restart waybar, I see the output from uairctl listen for about a second, then it disappears from waybar.

[metent]

I would suggest you to use the line exec = "uairctl listen"; in your polybar config and then create a user service for the 'main' uair instance using your init system. If you're using systemd you may use this service file.

[Unit]
Description=Uair

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/uair -q

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Alternatively, you can start the main instance when your window manager starts, but then the process is unsupervised and you can't start or stop it using your init system.

[haitemura]

The real reason why this happens is because uairctl listen prepends null terminators to every string except the first one. This can be observed by piping it into a file. uair does not do this, which is why your script works for the first time when starting waybar.

Here is the output of uairctl listen:

And here the output of just uair:

(The unicode characters at the end are because of my uair config.)
Waybar is written in C++ and so it thinks all those strings are empty, except for the first one, and it prints nothing.

[metent]

The real reason why this happens is because uairctl listen prepends null terminators to every string except the first one. This can be observed by piping it into a file. uair does not do this, which is why your script works for the first time when starting waybar.

Good catch! Will release a fix.