Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have a cron job that runs emacsclient which requires that XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to be set. I can set the variable to something like /run/user/1000 in the crontab but then this assumes that the owner of the cron is the first user to login (otherwise their XDG_RUNTIME_DIR would be /run/user/1001 for example).
Is there a better way to have cron inherit the value of XDG_RUNTIME_DIR from the owner of the cron jobs?
Suggesting to:
Include current user's environment context and additional environment variables.
cat << EOF > $HOME/croned_script.sh
#!/bin/bash
source $HOME/.bash_profile
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000
#
# your program and arguments from here:
emacsclient
EOF
In this example the cron pattern runs once at 12:00 noon each day
contab -l| sed "-i * 11 * * * bash -c $HOME/croned_script.sh"| crontab
1000? Otherwise, this sounds like a bad idea. Do you really need to runemacsclient, even if that user is not logged into an X session? I ask because there's very likely an easier solution (I don't have one better than actually running a login shell, which runs a script, which runs your emacsclient). I mean, emacsclient makes no sense if there's not already anemacsrunning that it can communicate with, so there's very many reasons this sounds like an XY Problem.