Techniques for a boot or cron script to find and interact with a GUI user?

catkin · 03-29-2010, 11:56 AM

Hello

Can a boot script or a script run by crond a) find and b) interact with a GUI interactive user?

Presumably it could look for a process tree headed by xdm, gdm or kdm and, if it could find and access their DISPLAY it could use something like dialog, Xdialog or zenity.

Any giants around? I'd like to stand on their shoulders!

Best

Charles

schneidz · 03-29-2010, 12:43 PM

does this help:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...0/#post1861245

catkin · 03-29-2010, 01:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by schneidz

does this help:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...0/#post1861245

Thanks schneidz

Yes that helps; I'll explore it soon. The xhost +localhost looks like an essential component in putting it together. In case there are more goodies in the toolkit, I'll not mark this thread solved yet.

catkin · 03-30-2010, 06:33 AM

The w command provides a generic way to determine which DISPLAY to use

Code:

c@CW8:~$ w
 16:58:06 up  2:13,  5 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.04, 0.00
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
[snip]
c        pts/5    :0.0             16:58    0.00s  0.00s  0.00s w

thence from the FROM column, presumably

Code:

export DISPLAY="$( /bin/hostname ):0.0

Will experiment and update.