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I have a script called display, which sets my desktop background using feh. It does so with the following line:

feh --bg-scale $WALLPAPER &

The environment variable $WALLPAPER is initialized in my .bashrc. The script works correctly if I execute it from an ordinary shell after login.

I want the script to be executed by i3 on startup. Therefore, I added the following line to ~/.config/i3/config:

exec display

and it doesn't work. I tried to redirect STDERR to a file, and the result is: 

feh: No loadable images specified.
See 'man feh' for detailed usage information

Moreover, if I try to echo $WALLPAPER inside display, I get a blank line. So the environment variable is not initialized yet. Fine - I tried to add exec /bin/bash -c "source ~/.bashrc" on the line above, but that seems to make no difference. How can I make sure this variable is initialized when i3 starts up?

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2 Answers 2

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Is i3 being executed by a different user, try providing an absolute path to the source command instead of relative path with ~

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  • Running ps -al | grep i3 returns 0 S 1000 4609 4591 0 80 0 - 38323 ep_pol tty2 00:00:00 i3, with the UID being 1000 (which is my UID). So I think it's being run by me. Changing ~ to an absolute path also doesn't seem to make a difference, I'm afraid. It does make me realise however that it's finding the display script which is in ~/bin, i.e. my PATH is being loaded correctly. Which is even more strange, since it's not loading other environment variables from startup.
    – preferred_anon
    Sep 7, 2019 at 8:51
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This was answered for me on Reddit. The problem is that .bashrc is only loaded by bash - putting the environment variables in ~/.profile means that it runs correctly.

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  • Well ~/.profile is loaded by bash as well, but only if there is no ~/.bash_profile and if the shell is started as a login shell. The sh shell should also read ~/.profile if it's started as a login shell. It's unclear what shell is running your i3 config file. Also, wouldn't running feh as a background job like that leave a lot of feh processes hanging around after a while?
    – Kusalananda ♦
    Sep 7, 2019 at 11:19
  • I happened to check this, it seems to use /bin/sh. I don't think it will run many fehs, since the script is in the i3config file, which is only loaded once when i3 starts.
    – preferred_anon
    Sep 8, 2019 at 9:37

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