KillUpdateProcess

Psychtoolbox › PsychPriority

wasRunning=KillUpdateProcess

OS X

Kill the OS X update daemon. Killing update prevents interruption of
MATLAB at 30-second intervals, enabling the Psychtoolbox to run smooth,
uninterrupted animations.

Use Priority or Rush instead of KillUpdateProcess; You need not invoke
KillUpdateProcess directly from your scripts because Priority and Rush do
that for you.


IMPORTANT: When first installing the Psychtoolbox on your computer, run
the included simplepsychtoolboxsetup.sh script from an OS X terminal
window. By modifying system file "/etc/sudoers"
simplepsychtoolboxsetup.sh gives MATLAB permission to shutdown the OS X
update process. KillUpdateProcess will detect if MATLAB does not have
permission to kill the update process and prompt you to run
simplepsychtoolboxsetup.sh.

KillUpdateProcess first checks to see if an update process is running. If
no update process is running, then KillUpdateProcess returns value 0 to
indicate that no update process was running. If an update process is
running, then KillUpdateProcess kills the update process, reads the jobs
list to verify that update was indeed killed, and returns value 1 to
indicate that update was running. If KillUpdateProcess can not kill
update because simplepsychtoolboxsetup.sh has not been run, then it
prompts within the MATLAB command window to run
simplepsychtoolboxsetup.sh, opens a terminal window, and issues
instructions.

To insure that MATLAB does not exit without restarting the update
process, The Psychtoolbox script finish.m, which MATLAB automatically
calls when exiting MATLAB, invokes StartUpdateProcess. KillUpdateProcess
will fail to kill update if it does not detect a finish.m file on the
MATLAB path which contains a call to StartUpdateProcess.

KillUpdateProcess will fail to kill update under any of these conditions:
- There is no finish.m file on the MATLAB path
- There is more than one finish.m file on the MATLAB path
- There is a single finish.m file on the MATLAB path but it does not
- The system "/etc/sudoers" file does not give MATLAB permission to

The OS X update process is part of its BSD Unix foundation. For more
information on update, see the Unix manual page for update. (Enter "man
update" in the OS X Terminal window.)

OS 9

KillUpdateProcess does not exist in OS 9.

WINDOWS

KillUpdateProcess does not exist in Windows.

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See also: StartUpdateProcess, KillUpdateProcess, IsUpdateRunning