'Singleton' application - or let the user only launch one instance of a program at the time

Posted by Disco on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Disco
Published on 2011-02-28T22:58:21Z Indexed on 2011/02/28 23:26 UTC
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ubuntu

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gnome

I'm running a few linux desktops; mainly for kids (yeah, trying to teach them the right OS at early stage) (running Ubuntu 10.10, Gnome)

The problem is that they found very funny to make their workstations (actually, old 512 Mb pentium 4) by launching thousands of firefox instances.

I'm looking for a way to restrict them to launch 'N' instances of a particular application. Haven't figured yet how. Thought of a monitoring daemon but I think that would be too ressources hungry.

Any idea of a script/trick to achieve this ?

Note: i might have 1-2 level of users (the kids, and the more grown up kids) so i have also to limit per user; something like user1: 3firefox, user2: 2firefox instances.

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