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So I was making a script that monitors my app usage. It does so by running a cronjob every minute, and cronjob in question checks which window is focused on and increments its counter by 1.

Other parts of code are insignificant, this is important part:

focused=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)
pid=$(xdotool getwindowpid $focused 2>/dev/null)
[ "$pid" ] &&
    pname="$(cat /proc/$pid/comm)" ||
    pname="idling"

I tested the script, and running it from dmenu, terminal or i3blocks, pname is what it is supposed to be every time. But when I run it from crontab, echo $pname ends up resulting in idling every single time.

I checked if I'm running my crontab as my user and not as root.

edit: Ideally I want to keep all my cronjobs in personal crontab, not in /etc/crontab for example.

Fedja
  • 115
  • 9

1 Answers1

3

It sounds like you do not mention DISPLAY environment variable at all. With xdotool, you'd be using X11, so the variable DISPLAY should match the DISPLAY variable from when you run this in a terminal in your graphical session:

echo $DISPLAY

edit: adding Quasimodo's comment here in the answer:

Try export DISPLAY=:0 in your script.

bgStack15
  • 391