Conditional program launcher

Question

The problem: I have an external hard drive and sometimes the driver crashes on startup. It does restart after some time. However my torrent client is also in my startup list and all the data is on the external hard drive. So if the driver fails it fails to find the files and starts downloading them again, eventually it gets an error and so on... So what I want to be able to do is to set up the launcher for the torrent program so that it won't start if the external drive is not present. Is this possible? And how would you go about doing it?

Answer 1

You could write a ShellScript that checks if the external-hd is mounted and if so start the torrent-client something like this...

#!/bin/bash

varCheck='mount | grep "/media/external_hd"'
if [[ ${#varCheck} > 0 ]]
then
   start torrent-client
fi 

and then put this in your autostart