This is a followup to a question about dialog boxes.

I want to show a dialog box both at the start of a session, and after n minutes of inactivity. I have decided to use zenity and xautolock. I have success invoking both from the command line (bash).

zenity --text=text --warning

xautolock -time 15 -locker "zenity --text=sometext --warning"

However, there are some constraints:

• The text has multiple words. If it has spaces, zenity will only show the first word and try to parse the other words as parameters. To fix this, I enclose the text in double quotes ("), but it leads to:


• xautolock takes the entire zenity command as an option for its -locker parameter. The command has multiple words, so I have to enclose it in quotes. But it already had quotes originally, so it conflicts on quotes-inside-quotes.


• I want the alert text to be customizable, so I'm using --text="$(cat .filename)".

So now what I have is:

zenity --text="$(cat .filename)" --warning

xautolock -time 15 -locker "zenity --text="$(cat .filename)" --warning"

If I run each line separately on a terminal session (bash), they do work. The cursor gets stalled waiting for the process to terminate, but the dialog boxes are displayed the way I need them.

Now I need it to start automatically with no user intervention. What I did:

• I've put each line separetedly on the Startup Applications list. Instead of showing the desired text, they will show $(cat on the dialog box.


• I created a command.sh file on my ~ folder, pasted these two lines, made it executable.


• Running the script from the command line works.


• Puting ~/command.sh as an entry on Startup Applications does not work. Nothing happens, nothing is displayed, no error message, nothing. According to this answer, it should work.


• Putting /home/username/command.sh does work, but this user is just a "skel" that gets copied to a guest user folder created upon login, so the username folder will be "guest-RANDOMSTRING", and I can't set is as a Startup Applications entry. For permission reasons, I can't set in to the "skel" user as well.