Cron with notify-send

Question

I need to show a notification from a cron job. My crontab is something like:

$ crontab -l
# m h  dom mon dow   command
  * *   *   *   *    Display=:0.0 /usr         


        

Answer 1

In Ubuntu 14.04 exporting the display did not work for me. Below is a cron script I'm using to shutdown a virtual machine when a laptop's battery state becomes too low. The line setting DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is the modification that finally got the warnings working correctly.

#!/bin/bash

# if virtual machine is running, monitor power consumption
if pgrep -x vmware-vmx; then

  bat_path="/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/"

  if [ -e "$bat_path" ]; then

    bat_status=$(cat $bat_path/status)

    if [ "$bat_status" == "Discharging" ]; then

      bat_current=$(cat $bat_path/capacity)

      # halt vm if critical; notify if low
      if [ "$bat_current" -lt 10 ]; then

        /path/to/vm/shutdown/script
        echo "$( date +%Y.%m.%d_%T )" >> "/home/user/Desktop/VM Halt Low Battery"

        elif [ "$bat_current" -lt 15 ]; then
        eval "export $(egrep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$(pgrep -u $LOGNAME gnome-session)/environ)";
        notify-send -i "/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-light/status/24/battery-caution.svg"  "Virtual machine will halt when battery falls below 10% charge."

      fi

    fi

  fi

fi

exit 0

The relevant line is here:

eval "export $(egrep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$(pgrep -u $LOGNAME gnome-session)/environ)";

I found the solution here: https://askubuntu.com/a/346580/255814