[PLUG] SOLVED Make cron send an e-mail upon completion

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2020 18:57:07 -0500
Tomas Kuchta <tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com> dijo:

>The topic to research would be X11 authorization and MIT cookies.
>
>It will require commands to run on both sides of the command line: a)
>your desktop will need to authorize the connection (every time you
>start desktop) b) Cron using that authorization to display the window.

Maybe the reason Ben's suggestions so far have not worked is that I
have not given root permission to access my desktop. If I need to do
that I would much prefer to automate it, so every time I log in the
permission is given again.

>The easiest to work around is probably for Cron to write a message to a
>file and some forever running desktop script checking that file and
>open the dialog.

I thought of that, and others have suggested it as well, but the
'forever running desktop script' might be easier to implement if it can
be run by another cron job, this time in my user space.

>Another alternative would be to use system messaging infrastructure in
>Gnome/KDE.

I use Xfce, but I assume that if Gnome and KDE have system messaging
infrastructure, so does Xfce. In fact, Xfce probably just borrows it
from Gnome, et al. Except that I have no knowledge of how to use it.

>One could also send a message to all user's consoles by ancient command
>wall.

I already tried wall. It failed the same as (g)xmessage and everything
else I tried. Anyway, it's a command line tool only and, while I always
have a terminal window running, I keep it minimized unless I'm actually
using it. I need something that I'm sure to see when I sit down at the
computer in the morning. My original mailto: plan would work because
the first thing I do after sitting down is to check mail.

There is yet another tool that might bear investigation. It was
suggested on the Ubuntu forums that I use actiona (apt install actiona).
Apparently it can be used like cron, and you can write your script
right in actiona, plus it will make whatever popups you want at the end
of your script. I've poked at it a little bit, but I haven't yet
determined if it can run my rsync command as root, but within my user
space. Unfortunately, while it says that its user interface is
intuitive, that claim is highly optimistic. And there exists no user
manual or help file.

I could also run the command as root using my crontab, but that is
universally frowned upon. The problem is that you need to pump in your
sudo password from a plain text file somewhere - not a good practice.