Pop up a message on the GUI from cron

Question

In KDE, I find that if I echo something to pts/0:

me@mypc:~$ echo hello > /dev/pts/0

I get a message flash sent to myself.

I'd like to make a cron job to send similar messages to myself regularly. How can I do this?

P.S. I know that Ctrl+Alt+F7 switches to the GUI, but echoing to /dev/tty7 just gives me a permission denied error.

@Thomas notify-send is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! If you post that as an answer, I'll accept it. — cst1992, Sep 04 '16 at 16:51

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 05 '16 at 08:23

5

If you want to send a pop up message to a user logged into a Desktop Environment, have a look at notify-send.

edited Sep 05 '16 at 08:23

cst1992

165

answered Sep 04 '16 at 17:12

Thomas

6,362

And see http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10121/open-a-window-on-a-remote-x-display-why-cannot-open-display about accessing X11 from cron. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Sep 05 '16 at 22:14

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 05 '20 at 08:54

2

xmessage is another way to spawn a window with text, which can work without notification daemons and can also have buttons.

Might be useful to someone, despite the facts it:

is ugly;
will spawn a tiling window in tiling window managers (I was actually searching for a way to fix that when I found this question);
does not work on wayland (obviously);

answered Jan 05 '20 at 08:54

user3459474

43

xmessage may be ugly, but unlike notify-send, it works from cron without messing about with environment variables, etc. It also runs on both Macs and Linux with zero hassle. It gets my vote! – Kevin Apr 11 '20 at 19:10
Correction: it turns out that if you run xmessage in a script called by cron, you DO have to put "export DISPLAY=:0" at the top of the script, but apart from that, xmessage is hassle-free. – Kevin Apr 12 '20 at 00:22

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 04 '16 at 09:52

1

Are you looking for the write command? This command allows you to send a message to a given user, which is then printed on his terminal/console. You can optionally specify the tty to send the message to.

answered Sep 04 '16 at 09:52

ph0t0nix

1,147

I know write already. I'm looking for a GUI alternative. – cst1992 Sep 04 '16 at 16:50

Pop up a message on the GUI from cron

3 Answers3