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How Does GFF Work?

GFF runs in the background and communicates with the browser, using an appropriate operating system mechanism. GFF has no user interface to speak of. In the normal course of events, GFF behaves like this:

During initialization, GFF attempts to contact a running browser. If it fails, GFF starts a browser for you. After contacting a browser, GFF sets up the communication mechanism and recedes into the background. From this point on, you can ignore GFF; it will run silently in the background handling requests from the browser.

When the browser exits, GFF notices this fact and silently exits as well.

You can end GFF explicitly, without closing the browser:

On Windows, open the GFF window (it was automatically minimized after initialization) and choose Exit off the system menu (the pull-down menu under the icon in the upper-left corner of the window).
On the Macintosh, select GFF from the Finder menu in the upper-right hand corner and choose Quit from the File menu.
On UNIX, run gff -quit or manually kill the background process by sending it the TERM. In order to send it a signal, you must know its process id. That id is stored in the file .gff.pid in your home directory. The following command will quit GFF on most versions of UNIX:
```
kill -TERM `cat $HOME/.gff.pid`
```

On some systems, if GFF started the browser, GFF can be configured to end the browser if you exit GFF directly.

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This page is taken from the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats and is licensed by O'Reilly under the Creative Common/Attribution license.