[Solved]Cron - feh wallpaper changer

Question

I tried the following script from the feh wiki page to change my wallpaper:
#!/bin/sh
WALLPAPERS="/mnt/path/to/wallpapers"
ALIST=( `ls -w1 $WALLPAPERS` )
RANGE=${#ALIST[*]}
SHOW=$(( $RANDOM % $RANGE ))
feh --bg-scale $WALLPAPERS/${ALIST[$SHOW]}
Here's the cron job (trying to run it every two minutes)
*/2 * * * * /usr/local/bin/wallpaper.sh
Why doesn't it work from cron? If I run the script from the command line, it works fine.
Any ideas?
Thanks, Scott
Last edited by firecat53 (2008-09-04 00:10:44)

Answer 1

Ok, I changed the script with su, but it's still not working. As an idiot check, I looked, and the cron deamon is indeed running
If I try to run the script from the command line now, it asks me for my user password . . . and I'm already running as that user.
I tried a test cron :
*/1 * * * * /bin/date >> /home/firecat53/date.txt
And it worked fine. The permissions on date.txt were firecat53:users 644. So doesn't that mean that that cronjob is executed as me? If I edited crontab like
sudo crontab -e
then I think it would create a job as the root user.
Could this have something to do with somehow needing to recognize a running X session, since feh is an X application?
#!/bin/sh
WALLPAPERS="/mnt/ubuntu-home/firecat53/docs/wallpapers"
ALIST=( `ls -w1 $WALLPAPERS` )
RANGE=${#ALIST[*]}
SHOW=$(( $RANDOM % $RANGE ))
su -c 'feh --bg-scale $WALLPAPERS/${ALIST[$SHOW]}' firecat53
I'm afraid I'm still stumped!
Thanks!
Scott
Last edited by firecat53 (2008-09-03 22:40:35)