'kill' in bash script

[pfarrar at learningco.com (pfarrar at learningco.com)]

     I don't think your problem is the 'kill'.  I think it's the program, 
     xargs.  It needs to run under X.
     
     If this were over a network I'd suggest a DISPLAY value in your 
     environment... but I'm not sure.  I'm not sure what xargs does 
     actually.  But your shell is not connecting to X.  Is it running as 
     you or as a seperate user?  Is there a non X program that does 
     whatever xargs does?


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: 'kill' in bash script
Author:  Ron Peterson <rpeterson at yellowbank.com> at InterNet
Date:    2/3/00 10:01 AM


Well I still haven't gotten my dumb kill script to work when called by 
cron.  I explicitly specified all paths.  Yes, I installed via 'crontab 
-e'.  I can run other crontab jobs, so it's not a cron permissions 
problem.
     
Here's the error message cron emails to me:
     
> usage: kill [ -s signal | -p ] [ -a ] pid ... 
>        kill -l [ signal ]
> 647
> Could not open X display "".
     
This script *does* work if I call it manually.  Here's the whole thing:
     
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/ybrp01/temp
/bin/ps ax | /bin/grep [b]ackfract | /bin/awk '{print $1}' | 
/usr/bin/xargs -n1 kill
/usr/games/bin/backfract -delay 240 -colors 256
     
and my crontab:
     
SHELL=/bin/bash
#
0 */1 * * *     /home/ybrp01/bin/background.bash
     
My best guess:  bash has both an interactive and a non-interactive 
mode.  Does bash not allow 'kill' in non-interactive mode?  Any way 
around this, if that's true?
     
I didn't try 'killall'.  That might work, but I guess I want to 
understand the underlying problem.  I should try it, though.  It would 
be informative to know whether it works or not.
     
Again, not at all important for me to get this to work.  But I hate 
being flummoxed.
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Message-ID: <3899985A.1DB90D74 at yellowbank.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2000 10:01:46 -0500
From: Ron Peterson <rpeterson at yellowbank.com>
Organization: Yellowbank
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