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I have a shell script to monitor table stats and java apps. It works fine when I run manually. But if I put it in the crontab it will get stuck if I don't redirect it's output with export display command. Any idea why?

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  • Do you mean export DISPLAY? That sounds like it's an X Windows application, so it needs to know the X server to put the window on. DISPLAY is normally set when you login to a GUI, and cron isn't in a GUI session.
    – Barmar
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 15:56
  • It would help if you posted the full command.
    – Barmar
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 15:56
  • heres the cron job */2 * * * * export DISPLAY=:1.0 && gnome-terminal -x /path/script.sh
    – ivcode
    Commented Apr 18, 2014 at 2:47
  • How do you expect gnome-terminal, whose whole purpose is to open a terminal emulator window on the screen, to work without setting DISPLAY?
    – Barmar
    Commented Apr 18, 2014 at 14:50
  • well I have opened display '1' and cronjob seems to work. But the problem is, if I add a cronjob for the same script without directing it to a display (ex: */2 * * * * /path/script.sh), the script will get stuck in middle of it's execution
    – ivcode
    Commented Apr 19, 2014 at 7:18

1 Answer 1

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The command should be:

DISPLAY=:1.0 gnome-terminal -x /path/script.sh

Since gnome-terminal is an X application, it uses the DISPLAY environment variable to connect to the X server and display its windows. To set an environment variable just for the duration of a single command, put the variable assignment at the beginning of the command line.

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