Calling website from cron job.

[SwimminSasquatch]

Hello all.

I have a script that has the line it and am trying to run that script as a cron job.

firefox ~/callGlenn.html & sleep 20

It works fine when I start the script manually, but crashes when it is called by cron. The error in the output mail is:

xterm:  DISPLAY is not set

What this script is doing is calling a local html page, that runs a javascript file, which in turn downloads a cgi script for a RealPlayer stream. This stream file is then parsed and recorded using mplayer, then converted to an mp3 with lame.

How do I set the display for xterm. I looked thorugh the man page, but it only gave a very vague description of what the display actually was for.

If any one could tell me how to accomplish this I would be very grateful. Or if there is a method other than using a web browser to basically "click a link" on some webpage I would love to hear about it.

Thanks in advance.

[Cabhan]

I would imagine that $DISPLAY is the variable holding the address of the X Server, and since cron is not being run from an X Server, this is empty.

Having said that, I would imagine that you could call a script like the following from cron (assuming, of course, that you have an X Server running somewhere):

DISPLAY=:0.0
firefox ~/callGlenn.html & ffpid=$!
sleep 20
kill $ffpid

Alternatively, this might work:

wget --spider -i ~/callGlenn.html

But I make no promises on the latter.

Try these and lemme know if they work.