Question

1

Restart Firefox with a cronjob

rated 0 times [ 1] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 2087 / 1 Year ago, sat, may 6, 2023, 8:48:44

I have a Ubuntu 14.04 system that just runs Firefox all day. Now I want to restart Firefox automatically once a day, so I created the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh

killall firefox

sleep 5

killall -9 firefox

sleep 2

/usr/bin/firefox -URL <...>

and set up da cronjob to call the script.
But it doesn't work, I get:

Error: no display specified

When I insert

export DISPLAY=:0

I get

No protocol specified

No protocol specified

Error: cannot open display: :0

What's the correct way to do it?

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ibuteking

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4 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago ersoggles · Accepted Answer

To execute a command through xserver of another user need to export two variables:

XAUTHORITY and DISPLAY.

First of all, is what DISPLAY is connected to the user by typing:

assuming that the user "username" uses the display "1", and that the script should be run at 23:30, upgrade your crontab, as follows:

30 23 *** export XAUTHORITY=/home/username/.Xauthority && export DISPLAY=:1 && /path/to/script 2> /tmp/error_cron.log

the last part of the line is to save any errors in /tmp/error_cron.log