Batocera Services

This feature was introduces in Batocera v38 Blue Moon and is a powerful replacement for the custom.sh. We can devide two setups. First the preinstalled services which should not be altered and in second instance the Userservices that are stored to directory: /userdata/system/services. In both cases the activation state can altered through EmulationStation Frontend: Main Menu –> System Settings –> Services

Even if custom.sh is still working (10/2024) it is recommended to use the service section for future proof setups.

Disabling services (with batocera-services disable or through the UI) doesn't stop them. That needs to be done manually with batocera-services stop. Disabling them only means that they wil not be automatically started after the next system startup.

Enabling them (with batocera-services enable or through the UI) works the same. To actually start a service, enable it first, then restart Batocera or use batocera-services start.

For filenames there are some rules! This is caused by the handling for this kind of usecase. Every file is exported as systemvariable so only charaters from A-Z and digits 0-9 (not as first letter!) are allowed. Spaces, dots, bracketes and regional chars like ß,œ or я are not allowed.

Some file examples:

• Hello –> okay
• Hello_5 –> okay
• Hello.sh –> not allowed
• 5_Hello –> not allowed
• Hello-5 –> not allowed
• Hallöle –> not allowed

You can test your script names by typing batocera-services list user you will receive a result-list of your services.

[root@BATOCERA /userdata/system/services]# batocera-services list user
Hello      -
Hello_5    -
WARNING: Invalid service script name: Hello.sh
WARNING: Invalid service script name: 5_Hello
WARNING: Invalid service script name: Hello-5
WARNING: Invalid service script name: Hallöle

All these scripts are initiated through /etc/init.d/S99userservices so there is a start and a stop condition that can be used inside the scripts. S99 will wait for all scripts to be finished, so be aware of your scripts using sleep timers and infinite do-while loops.

As a bonus: These scripts can also be used on FAT-file systems and are started through bash-interpreter, so you don't need them executable through chmod +x your_service_file command (even if it would be best practise).

This script will check for proper filenames and automatically alter them and even make backups from your script. There was also an interesting thread, where a user asked if downloaded scripts from this wiki have Windows newlines just forced by browser download and how to avoid them. Of course it an be done…. We can run a small Sanatizer script. With some changes it will also Sanatize the boot scripts for example - imho tools like DOS2UNIX do their best job here.

#!/bin/bash
# Sanatize Service by crcerror (second life)
# Selfrepair first
grep -rlq $'\r' "$0" && dos2unix -k -q "$0" && exit 0
 
#only on start condition
[[ $1 == stop ]] && exit 0
 
# Sanatize Windows-CRLF to unix-style
# Sanatize filenames: Use underscore for non allowed characters
 
pushd /userdata/system/services > /dev/null
 
find -type f -printf '%f\n' |
while read USER_SERVICE
do
    SANITIZE=${SERVICE//[^0-9A-Za-z_]/}
    SANITIZE=$(echo "$SANITIZE" | sed 's/^[[:digit:]]*//')
    if [[ "${USER_SERVICE}" =! "${SANITIZE}" ]]
    then
        mv -b --suffix=_backup "${USER_SERVICE}" "${SANITIZE}"
        grep -rlq $'\r' "${SANITIZE}" && dos2unix -kq "${SANITIZE}" 
    fi
 
        grep -rlq $'\r' "${USER_SERVICE}" && dos2unix -kq "${USER_SERVICE}"
 
done
 
popd > /dev/null