How to prevent a standalone kernel from opening windows?

I am trying to make Mathematica do some plots for me as a part of a script. I have a .m file that basically does Import[] on some data followed by

Export["plot.png", Graphics[...]]


I run this with math -script file.m. However every time I am distracted by a window that appears for a split second when the above command is executed. Obviously this is a source of unnecessary focus loss and delay. I suspect this command is responsible as I did not see it happen when I commented it out. I also believe that a window is not necessary because I can perfectly well run the same script in a text-only runlevel and I get the output plot just fine. How do I reach the same behaviour when running from an X terminal?

• If I press Ctrl+C during the procedure I get: Interrupt during LinkConnect> in the command line and in a few seconds a message box appears saying "One or more programs are currently using the Wolfram Language front end as a service..." This happens even if I unset $DISPLAY prior to running the command. May 18, 2016 at 11:01 • Mar 14, 2017 at 21:39 2 Answers You may use WolframScript (its documentation page is wolframscript). As it states in the documentation you can create a script file from File | New | Script (.wls). It has a notebook similar to package development but includes a script header. I put in two lines of code for data and export. The resulting script file contained. #!/usr/bin/env wolframscript (* ::Package:: *) data=RandomFunction[WienerProcess[.3,.5],{0,1,0.01}]; Export[FileNameJoin[{$UserDocumentsDirectory,"scriptPlot.png"}],ListLinePlot[data,Filling->Axis],"PNG"];


I am on Windows and it seems that wolframscript's installation directory was added to the system paths. Therefore I just went to the directory where I saved the script with the command prompt and entered:

wolframscript -file Test.wls


I can also just type in the script file name since the file extension is registered.

Test.wls


No windows popped up and the follow image appeared in my documents directory.

I think WolframScript appeared in version 10.4 or 11. I believe it can be downloaded separately from the link I provided at the top if you have an earlier version.

Hope this helps.

I believe your graphics export is requiring a front end. This line below should cause it to run in background.

UsingFrontEnd[Export["plot.png", Graphics[...]]]


Alternatively try

math -noicon -script file.m

• Thanks! That's my guess, too. But interestingly MMA can do without the front end as I can run this from a text console (unless it launches its own dummy X server just for that purpose in the background). Unfortunately -noicon does not seem to make much difference in my Gnome environment—not to the momentary focus loss, at least, but even the icon flashes quickly. I was aware of UsingFrontEnd but I think I'm looking for an exact opposite of that, if that makes any sense in the system. May 18, 2016 at 16:01