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I'd like to send a notification bubble to the gnome desktop from a shell script that is executed by cron.

To make it able to communicate with the desktop environment DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS env variable needs to be set within the script. I'm trying to achieve this by the following code which isn't working.

#!/usr/bin/env sh
export DISPLAY=:0
dbus=$(env | grep DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS | sed 's/DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=//')
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$dbus
[...]
notify-send -u critical "Blah" "Blubb"

When hardcoded it works fine

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS='unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-HjnsLUTTrn,guid=17c8962443279ebbe24dcd66536278dd'

Problem is, the dbus session address changes so hardcoding isn't an option.

What am I doing wrong?

datensalat
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1 Answers1

4

env when invoked from a script run by cron, only had the following variables set in my box.

SHELL=/bin/sh USER=clement PATH=/usr/bin:/bin PWD=/home/clement HOME=/home/clement SHLVL=2 LOGNAME=clement _=/usr/bin/env

and so grep in 

$(env | grep DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS | sed 's/DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=//')

didn't give any output. The following should work.

#!/bin/bash
PID=$(pgrep gnome-session)
dbus=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$PID/environ|cut -d= -f2-)
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$dbus
notify-send -u critical "Blah" "Blubb"
clement
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  • I had solved it by writing the result of `$(env | grep DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS | sed 's/DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=//')` to a file in ~/. using the login script and reading it back into `$dbus`. Yours is more elegant though. – datensalat May 06 '14 at 23:10
  • Replace `gnome-shell` with `nautilus` on Ubuntu. – Jonas Gröger Dec 26 '15 at 17:41