xterm trivia

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1

Thanks Livin Free...

Here's another one... Why is it that I always get the error message "Error: Can't open display:" in my mail whenever I execute or try to call an xterm command using cron to activate the command. What did I miss? Thanks in advance UNIX gurus...

2

This indicates that cron does not have permission to access your X display. Maybe if you set the DISPLAY variable explicitly from cron? I'm not sure why you would need to run an X term from cron anyway...X apps are inherently interactive, they are not really designed to be run non-interactively from cron.

3

Would you suggest that we customize an X-application for this purpose? Are there other options? Thanks for your reply.

4

I think PxT is correct in saying that the DISPLAY variable is not set. You can set the $DISPLAY in cron, or in your srcipt / application.

If you just want some quick, simple notification, you could pop up an xterm on, say, $DISPLAY=":0", with a few lines of code:

#!/bin/sh
DISPLAY=":0"
Pay_Attention () {
echo "It is time for you to pay attention!"
echo "Press {Enter} when you are done..."
read _dummy_response
  case $_dummy_response in
     *) exit 0 ;;
   esac
}

xterm -e Pay_Attention
exit

I'm sure there's a better way of doing that, but thats the first one that popped into my head... Heck, that as-is probably won't work, but it given you an idea of what I'm thinking, right? :slight_smile:
Either way - the xterm will close when someone presses the enter key...

added code tags for readability --oombera