Controlling Nautilus programmatically

[Jason Tackaberry <tack auc ca>]

Hi everyone,

I find myself in a situation where I wish to control certain aspects of
Nautilus from an external program (specially a python script).  There
are specific areas I need to control:

     1. Ability to close certain windows.  For example if /mnt/server is
        about to get unmounted, I'd like to be able to close all
        nautilus windows with a view on /mnt/server.
     2. Ability to force a refresh the desktop.  The desktop may have
        symlinks to mounts that are about to go away.  I'd like to force
        it to refresh so that the icons indicate these directories are
        no longer available.  Similarly, if there are new NFS/SMB mounts
        that suddenly appear, I'd like to also refresh the desktop to
        update icons for links to directories that may now exist.  fam
        doesn't appear to take care of this, presumably because the
        symlinks themselves have not changed.

As you may have gleaned from my questions, I'm writing a tool that
handles dealing with setting up SMB and NFS mounts (and also renewing IP
on the interface, but that's off-topic here) when I connect my system
(laptop) to different networks.

Any help on the above questions would be much appreciated.  I ran across
a reference to an idea for a nautilus-meta-client that I thought would
be perfect for this sort of application.  Unfortunately it never got
past the idea stage it seems.  See
http://lists.eazel.com/pipermail/nautilus-list/2001-October/005829.html

Thanks,
Jason.

-- 
Jason Tackaberry  ::  tack auc ca  :: 705-949-2301 x330 
Academic Computing Support Specialist
Information Technology Services
Algoma University College  ::  www.auc.ca