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

If you are having issue that your notify-send script is working fine locally but it is not working with cron jobs then use this command. and replace "saurav" with your username.

sudo -u saurav DISPLAY=:0 DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus notify-send "Your message goes here"

Answer 2

On recent Ubuntu versions, the following should work.

#notify_me.sh, can be placed e.g. in your home directory

#!/bin/bash
eval "export $(egrep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$(pgrep -u $LOGNAME gnome-session)/environ)";
# the actual notification
DISPLAY=:0 notify-send "Notify me!"

Then you add a line to your user's cronjobs via crontab as usual.

Answer 3

Similar to nmax above, I also solved the issue by setting DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable. However, I am using a combination of Linux Mint 19 (xfce4) and XMonad and for some reason, I don't have the process xfce4-session running. Instead, I found that xfce4-terminal is (usually) running, which resulted in the following line in the beginning of my script:

eval "export $(egrep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$(pgrep -u $LOGNAME xfce4-terminal)/environ)"

This resolved the issue for me.

Answer 4

Simple and reduced answer:

01 * * * * export DISPLAY=:0.0 && notify-send Hey "How are you"

If you need Xauthority permission, here's a generalizable form using the $LOGNAME variable

01 * * * * export DISPLAY=:0.0 && && export XAUTHORITY=/home/$LOGNAME/.Xauthority notify-send Hey "How are you"

As pointed out by @tripleee, there's no real need for sudo here

Answer 5

Try this when you call notify-send in your script:

echo "PASSWORD" | sudo -u USER notify-send "your alert message"

Answer 6

Work for me on fedora 22:

Put this line in the .sh script before notify-send get called:

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