GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 586087
Command-line option to wait for the window to close before exiting
Last modified: 2009-10-20 17:19:58 UTC
Original report: http://bugs.debian.org/525155 - Stefano Zacchiroli When there are no evince instances running, invoking "evince FILE" will spawn a new evince, and wait for its window to be closed before returning control to the invoker. When there is an evince instance already running, invoking "evince FILE" returns immediately. This breaks console applications, like mutt, which rely on the returning executable to understand that the viewing of FILE is over (and hence the temporary file, if this is the case, can be deleted). I understand that this is because evince reuses processes and "attach" to the pre-existing process if there is one. But still the invoking client can be made to wait instead of quitting, maybe with an additional command line flag that can be declared for the evince instance in mailcap? Otherwise as a mailcap reader for PDF, evince is pretty broken at the moment, at least for apps like mutt.
This should be fixed in git master since evince uses now multiple processes. Thanks for reporting.