Thanks Mr. Ritter for sharing your expertise. I think the one thing that kind of mystifies me a little is the bus pipe. I am not familiar with that. A simple logout and log back in made my "environment" return to "normal."
As you recommended, I simply ran the bash script on it's own. It worked fine. But, as I was debugging it, over time, it stopped working. Perhaps based, as you say, on nautilus getting confused. It frustrated me a bit. Because, at that point, not even running the script, alone, would work. I found a better solution. I found a python API that was coded specifically for this purpose, and I am more familiar with python than I am with Bash (though I admit, Bash probably is better suited for many tasks at this level). What's the saying about the "devil you know?" =) Thanks again! -----Original Message----- From: Dan Ritter <d...@randomstring.org> To: Esteban L <este...@little-beak.com> Cc: debian-user <debian-user@lists.debian.org> Subject: Re: notify-send script messed up my environment Date: Tue, 7 May 2019 18:12:01 -0400 Esteban L wrote: > I stepped in poo, and broke a cardinal sin, trying a script that I > didn't 100% understand. Now my environment is a little bit jacked. > Not > bad, still generally functioning. > > I was trying to get notifications to run from the command line, > namely > crontab. No easy task, at least, not as easy as I would have thought. > > I created and ran this script I found online: > #!/bin/bash > username=$(/usr/bin/whoami) > pid=$(pgrep -u $username nautilus) > dbus=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$pid/environ | sed > 's/DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=//' ) > export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$dbus > /usr/bin/notify-send "$(today)" > > It seemed simple enough. > > It even worked a few half dozen times. Until, it didn't. > > I couldn't even run the script anymore, from the command line. > I get the following error: > grep: /proc/1700: Is a directory > grep: 25836/environ: No such file or directory > > I tried to "man" up but can't find anything on dbus, dbus_session > etc. > > I think it's as simple as messing up my environment. > > Can someone throw me a bone? I guess I could restart, and I assume > that > should work, but that doesn't really explain to me why it broke, > which > interests me more. Let's go through the script and see if we can explain it. #!/bin/bash this is a bash script; please use /bin/bash to run it. username=$(/usr/bin/whoami) run the command /usr/bin/whoami and put the output in the variable "username" pid=$(pgrep -u $username nautilus) run pgrep, look for a process named nautilus owned by that username. Put the process ID in the variable "pid". dbus=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$pid/environ | sed 's/DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=//' ) look through the contents of the file in /proc/ (process id) /environ and find the line which contains the word DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS. pipe that line through the stream editor to remove a bunch of characters and leave the rest. Put the value in the variable "dbus". export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$dbus Make that "dbus" variable available to programs I run. /usr/bin/notify-send "$(today)" Run "notify-send" with a value that comes from a program called "today". Here are my suggestions: Test running /usr/bin/notify-send "Boo!" If you get a notification, it's working. If not, you have deeper problems. Test with echo. After each variable assignment, run echo $username or echo $pid and so forth, as appropriate, to see what values you are getting. Spaces and linebreaks are important. "Nautilus" is not a foolproof way of knowing which X session is wanted. $(today) probably doesn't do what you want. -dsr-
