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Run firefox from cron

  • 1 reply
  • 3 have this problem
  • 8 views
  • Last reply by pj11

ecornely
ecornely
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Hello,

I’m using firefox-dev under debian linux and since last updates my cron script that was supposed to open a certain url in firefox at a regular schedule stopped working.

I do export DISPLAY=:0 than run firefox $url and all was fine previously but now I always received a message : “Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.”

You can easily reproduce by running : sudo -u $(whoami) /path/to/firefox-dev/firefox https://www.google.com

Can somebody explain what is checked by firefox and why it consider it is not responding instead of just open my url in a new tab ?

Hello, I’m using firefox-dev under debian linux and since last updates my cron script that was supposed to open a certain url in firefox at a regular schedule stopped working. I do export DISPLAY=:0 than run firefox $url and all was fine previously but now I always received a message : “Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.” You can easily reproduce by running : sudo -u $(whoami) /path/to/firefox-dev/firefox https://www.google.com Can somebody explain what is checked by firefox and why it consider it is not responding instead of just open my url in a new tab ?

All Replies (1)

pj11
pj11
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I have the same problem. Here is the line from my crontab: 

   0   5    *   *   *   DISPLAY=:0.0 /usr/bin/firefox -new-window https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

It started just a month or two ago. It's hard to search for since there is more than a decade of results with the same error message but some different cause. The key difference here is running it from cron (or sudo as shown above for easier reproducibility). Perhaps because it's a non-login shell?