How to cleanly quit kodi/emulationstation/raspbian from the command line

Question

I’ve written a bunch of shell script functions that allow me to switch between these 3 apps which require exclusive access to a vt channel: raspbian, emulationstation(/RetroPie), and kodi. My intent is to use them in homebridge-commander so that I can switch between these apps using Siri.

I wrote a function for each system to stop that system, but I have 2 problems.

Problem 1

Each OS will stop, but if I've run Kodi at some point, I don’t see the console when I stop whichever one is currently running. All I see is a black screen. I can start up another app, no problem. I can use the connected keyboard (and type without seeing what I'm typing) or ssh and start up another OS, but stopping one of these apps still results in a black screen. I have functions to switch the app in one call, but I want to be able to simply stop whichever app is running and get to the console.

One manual fix I’ve learned is to type alt+F1. I also discovered that if I type sudo chvt 2;sudo chvt 1 I can get back to a console I can see. (Note, simply typing sudo chvt 1 does not work. The screen stays completely black.)

So I think VT1 is getting into a strange state and I figure it must have something to do with the way I’m killing Kodi using pkill.

How do I stop Kodi in a way that returns VT1 back to a working console screen?

Note, manually stopping these apps using the GUI works fine and I get back to a visible console, but I want to be able to control it via a command line call in homebridge-commander.

Problem 2

I discovered recently that the way I'm killing emulationstation (pkill emulationstatio) doesn't actually stop all its components. I had a game running and tried killing emulationstation, but the game remained on the screen. I couldn't play the game. It just seemed frozen. Also, game play was occasionally freezing, which I suspect was due to previously having killed emulationstation in this fashion and starting it back up.

So what's the best way to stop emulationstation (and any emulators it's running) from the command line?

Answer 1

A child process of kodi still has control of vt 1. Just doing pkill kodi orphans the child, but doesn't kill it. The screen goes black because kodi is effectively half-dead. Killing kodi and all its child processes will return you back to the console.

The situation for emulationstation is similar - killing all the children will solve the other issue. But let's use kodi as the example...

To get all the pids of kodi and its children, you can do something like this (in bash). First, create a function to get all child PIDs of a given PID:

getfamilypids() {
    local inpid="$1"
    local pidarray=()

    function getfamilypidshelper() {
        local pidin="$1"
        pidarray+=($pidin)
        local CPIDS="$(pgrep -P $pidin)"
        for cpid in $CPIDS; do
            getfamilypidshelper $cpid
        done
    }

    getfamilypidshelper "$inpid"

    #reverse the array
    local rpidarray=()
    for ((z=${#pidarray[*]}-1; z>-1; z--)); do
        rpidarray+=(${pidarray[z]})
    done

    echo ${rpidarray[*]}
}

To get the PID of the kodi process you started, you can do this:

pgrep -f kodi

Then you can get the child processes of the PID you get back:

getfamilypids __PID_FROM_ABOVE__

Note, the order of the PIDs from getfamilypids is reversed. You should kill them sequentially from left to right. I wrote a method to automatically kill all of them and wait for them to finish cleanly before killing the next, but that's a topic for another question.