scripting gnuclient and emacs for mutt [ was: emacsclient -nw]

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 02:54:48PM -0500, David Z Maze wrote:
> Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> writes:
> 
> While this doesn't help your actual problem, you should probably be
> aware that 'emacs' and 'xemacs' are separate programs, either of which
> can run in X or not in X.  ('xemacs -nw' works; 'emacs' with $DISPLAY
> set will pop up an X window.)

Hey, I really hadn't understood this, thanks, this  helps!

> See earlier commentary about XEmacs; gnuclient(1) is the XEmacs
> equivalent to emacsclient, and it does claim to support a -nw option.
> I could see things being unhappy if you set $EDITOR to that, but it's
> easy enough to write a shell script:
> 
>   #!/bin/sh
>   # moremacs: open a file under gnuclient
>   exec gnuclient -nw "$@"

gnuclient -nw does indeed work!  thanks.  

Now a question:  the problem with setting my editor to gnuclient -nw
is that I may at times not have xemacs running on the computer.  Then
gnclient exits with an error message, and I can't write mail (not
fatal) -- in mutt I can get a shell and start xemacs -unmapped; but
still...)  So I'd like to wrote a script that does something like
this:

-try to run gnuclient; if it works, exit
else
-run xemacs -nomapped 
-run gnuclient

is it possible in bash to test whether a comand has actually worked?
I feel like I've seen such tests, but I tried one and can't make it
work for me: 

#! /bin/bash
if [ 'gnuclient -q $*' ]; then 
echo "no problem, xemacs running" 
gnuclient -q $*
else
	echo "starting xemacs"
	/usr/bin/xemacs -unmapped $* &
	/usr/bin/gnuclient -q $*
fi


So for now I have the following:  

#! /bin/bash
if [ "A`ps -e | grep xemacs | grep -v grep`" = "A" ]; then
    /usr/bin/gnuclient -q $*
else
  /usr/bin/xemacs $* &
fi

this always exits with an error: 
 XEmacs: standard input is not a tty

anyone know why I'm getting that?  

thanks as always for the help,
matt