How to stop or restart bp

While some Animations can have a specific, fixed length like ten seconds, most of them go on indefinitely. Sometimes you want to tell bp to stop running, or you want to tell it to restart from the beginning again.

1. Control-C

The simplest way to stop bp is using Control-C - hold down the Control or CTR key and press C.

Control-C interrupts almost any command line program, not just BiblioPixel. It must be done in the command line or terminal which is running bp.

2. Unix signals

This is an advanced section which can safely be skipped on first reading!

A more versatile way (which unfortunately does not work on Windows) is to send a Unix signal to the bp process.

bp understands three Unix signals:

SIGINT

Shut bp down in a controlled fashion, turning off all lights: equivalent to typing Control-C.

SIGTERM

Shut bp down immediately.

SIGHUP

Stop the running bp Project in a controlled fashion, create a new Project by re-reading the originalo Project file, then run it.

SIGHUP is particularly useful for developers who want to restart their application with a new Animation without taking the several seconds it would take to bring bp down and back up again.

A tiny bash utility bp-pid is installed with BiblioPixel to report on the process ID that’s running bp.

For example, to send a SIGHUP to the running bp process, if any, use this command line:

$ kill -hup `bp-pid`

This will restart bp if it is running, otherwise cause an error.

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