I'm trying to use KCron to setup a job to run firefox to load a specific URL every hour.

I get an email error from the Cron Daemon saying this...

Cron <njdube@linux> /opt/MozillaFirefox/bin/firefox.sh http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.ph...=smite;uid=486
From:
Cron Daemon <root@linux.site>
To:
njdube@linux.site
Date:
Today 12:00:02 am
*
/opt/MozillaFirefox/bin/firefox.sh: line 128: [: too many arguments

(firefox-bin:10376): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: *


This is what I put in to run...

http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.ph...plaud;uid=1134

The cron part works fine. It runs every hour like I wanted. What's not working is... well you can see the error for your self in the email.

Any idea how to get this to work? The goal is to get the URL "http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.php?action=modifykarma;sa=smite;uid=486" to load every hour.

I thought of trying w3m but I just started to learn about it and I can't figure out why it doesn't keep the user name and password of the site after closing w3m. As if it's not saving the cookie or something.

I don't really care what browser I use. I just want that URL to load every hour.

Use wget. It's a command-line utility, and doesn't need access to the X display device.

Never mind, someone showed me how to make a script and load that instead.

njdube, would you mind telling us how you solved it? I am also trying to open a url with firefox on a daily schedule and I am getting the same error. I created a shell script to open firefox and load the page I want, and that works fine when manually called from a terminal, but genreates the error above when cron tries to run it.

I made a script called appalud.sh and put it in /home/njdube/bin

Here is my script

************************************************
export DISPLAY=:0
/opt/MozillaFirefox/bin/firefox.sh "http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.php?action=modifykarma;sa=applaud;uid=1134;topic=6232.0;m=101694"
************************************************

The above script should only be two lines. This BBS is doing word wrapping crap.

The problem is, for the script to work you have to leave a copy of firefox running when the script is executed. It's a small annoyance if you don't mind leaving firefox running all the time.

I used a KDE program called KCron to set the cron job. I'm still not that happy using the CLI.

Make sure you right click on the script and check mark "Is executable" under the "Permissions" tab if you're in KDE.

I don't know what your experience is in cron jobs. But in KCron make sure every thing is check marked. Except in the minutes section just pick 00. That's if you just want it to run once every hour every day.

In KCron what you're doing is check markting the time you want it to run. It's weird. It just takes getting used to.

Thanks njdube! Adding the line to the script and leaving firefox running has solved my problem.