[ale] Launch GUI from Cron

[Brian Pitts]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Sun 2007-09-09 02:51:15 -0400, Brian Pitts wrote:
> 
>> I created the following script
>>
>> #!/bin/sh
>> export DISPLAY=:0
>> zenity --question --text="What are you doing?"
>>
>> and added an entry for it in my crontab. Although syslog shows that it
>> runs, I never see the dialog. Any suggestions on making this work?
> 
snip
> 
> Is there a way you can ask zenity to provide more explicit debugging
> spew?  can you have the script dump error messages to a logfile?
> 
>   exec 1>~/nag.log && exec 2>&1

This worked, the problem is in fact

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified
(zenity:26396): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

Ran strace -f -o within cron, and the first thing that looked like a 
problem was

26576 access("/home/brian/.Xauthority", R_OK) = -1 EACCES (Permission 
denied)

Not surprising, since ~/.Xauthority is owned by root and has permissions 
of 600. Temporarily changing ownership of this to myself didn't change 
the behavior, though.

I've already written a small Ruby/Gtk app to do what I want, so I'm not
particularly motivated to solve this.

I have a new question though. Why does using exec to redirect the
shell's output work when using zenity &> ~/nag.log does not?

-Brian