Cron with Notify-Send

Cron with notify-send

I found the answer:

$ crontab -l
# m h  dom mon dow   command
  * *   *   *   *    export DISPLAY=:0.0 && export XAUTHORITY=/home/ravi/.Xauthority && sudo -u ravi /usr/bin/notify-send Hey "How are you"

notify-send doesn't work in crontab (doesn't send a notification)

So finally, I follow this topic (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1533494) and it works now. Thanks you Philibobby !

Crontab of python script using notify-send

I'm using a little bit different code, but the end result is what you were trying to achieve: get notify-send to work from a python script via crontab.

Here's my Python 3.x script:

import subprocess
subprocess.Popen(['notify-send', 'Running.'])

And here's how I setup crontab:

DISPLAY=:0.0
XAUTHORITY=/home/matrix/.Xauthority
*/1 * * * * /usr/bin/python3 /home/user/path/to/my/script.py

This should work with Ubuntu 16.04 and python3, I cannot speak for other OS's, but you can give it a try. Use which to check the path of your python or python3 installation.

By the time I finished this answer the "Running." notification popped up at least 3 times.

Executing notify-send from fish script as cronjob

if I echo $DISPLAY in my terminal I get :0.0

Yes, but your cronjob doesn't run in your terminal.

In Unix, environment variables are passed from parent processes to their children when they're started.

The fish inside your terminal is a child of that terminal, which has $DISPLAY set to contact X.

But your cronjobs are run by your cron daemon, which is typically a child of your init process, which in turn doesn't have any parent. So it inherits the environment of init.

Set $DISPLAY in your script. This isn't pretty (and I can't say I like the approach of having a cronjob that sends notifications to begin with), but it should work, at least if you have the typical setup with one X server.

Note that fish is entirely irrelevant in this case - it would happen no matter what you picked as shell.

Some plausible alternatives (though I've not looked into them far):

Run a watch job in a terminal or via your DE's autostart mechanism. This just reruns things every X seconds, but has $DISPLAY
Use systemd's timer stuff, in particular as a user. There's a command to "upload" an environment variable to systemd, so it can then use it in timers.

notify-send not working from cron

Not sure why but this worked. Rather calling the notify-send directed added that in a script.

* * * * * export DISPLAY=:0.0 && /bin/sh /home/notifyCustom.sh

send email and notify-send do not work in crontab

When run as cron, you don't have any environment set up. Not even a PATH. So it is probably not finding notify-send or ssmtp.

Either add a PATH at the beginning of your script, or give fully-qualified path names to commands that you issue.

Cron with Notify-Send