Gsettings with cron

Question

I wrote a bash script that changes the wallpaper (for GNOME3).

#!/bin/bash

# Wallpaper's directory.
dir="${HOME}/images/wallpapers/"

# Random wallpaper.
wallpaper=`find "${dir}" -type f | shuf -n1`

# Change wallpaper.
# http://bit.ly/HYEU9H
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options "spanned"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "file://${wallpaper}"

Script executed in a terminal emulator (eg gnome-terminal) works great. During the execution by cron, or ttyX terminal getting the error:

** (process:26717): WARNING **: Command line `dbus-launch --autolaunch=d64a757758b286540cc0858400000603 --binary-syntax --close-stderr' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.\n

** (process:26717): WARNING **: Command line `dbus-launch --autolaunch=d64a757758b286540cc0858400000603 --binary-syntax --close-stderr' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.\n

** (process:26721): WARNING **: Command line `dbus-launch --autolaunch=d64a757758b286540cc0858400000603 --binary-syntax --close-stderr' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.\n

** (process:26721): WARNING **: Command line `dbus-launch --autolaunch=d64a757758b286540cc0858400000603 --binary-syntax --close-stderr' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.\n

Answer 1

Finally I managed how to solve this issue after many, many attempts.

Indeed, the problem occur because cron uses only a very restricted set of environment variables. And the only one environment variable that is responsible for running in the right way the script from the question when this is set as a cron job is DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS, not DISPLAY or XAUTHORITY or GSETTINGS_BACKEND or something else. This fact was also pointed well in this answer.

But the problem in this answer is that there's no guarantee that the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS variable from that file from ~/.dbus/session-bus/ directory is updated to the current value from the current gnome session. To go over this problem a method would be to find the PID of a process in the current gnome session, and obtain the dbus address from its environment. We can do this as follow:

PID=$(pgrep gnome-session)  # instead of 'gnome-session' it can be also used 'noutilus' or 'compiz' or the name of a process of a graphical program about that you are sure that is running after you log in the X session
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$PID/environ|cut -d= -f2-)

That being said, the script should look like:

#!/bin/bash

# TODO: At night only dark wallpapers.

# Wallpaper's directory.
dir="${HOME}/images/wallpapers/"

# export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable
PID=$(pgrep gnome-session)
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$PID/environ|cut -d= -f2-)

# Random wallpaper.
wallpaper=`find "${dir}" -type f | shuf -n1`

# Change wallpaper.
# http://bit.ly/HYEU9H
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options "spanned"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "file://${wallpaper}"