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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T21:40:38+00:00

I’ve got a python program which runs via crontab and that works perfectly. However,

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I’ve got a python program which runs via crontab and that works perfectly. However, I decided to add the ability to notify me of what it’s doing, and suddenly it’s failing. It runs from the command line, however, running it as a crontab program causes it to fail

libnotify-Message: Unable to get session bus: /bin/dbus-launch terminated abnormally with the following error: Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.

What am I doing wrong?

Edit
I would like this program to still run from cron and be able to take advantage of notifying the user of it’s work. Is there any way to do this?

Edit 2
I’ve tried using root’s crontab and sudo -u esr python script.py yet this also fails, silently at that.

Edit 3
It is possible! Here’s the code.

* * * * * su $user -c "DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$(ps -au esr | grep -i "gnome-session" | awk '{ print $1 }')/environ | sed -e 's/DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=//') $(whereis notify-send | awk '{ print $2 }') -u normal -t 20000 \"Hello\" "
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    * * * * * su esr -c "DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$(ps -au esr | grep -i "gnome-session" | awk '{ print $1 }')/environ | sed -e 's/DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=//') $(whereis notify-send | awk '{ print $2 }') -u normal -t 20000 \"Hello\" "

    As per a suggestion, an explanation, unfortunately not mine

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