On 01/22/2012 05:06 PM, Allen Weiner wrote:
I'm stumped as to why I get differing behavior when issuing a certain
command from a user terminal versus when that command is issued via
KDE-autostart. I suspect there's a Linux fundamental I'm overlooking.
I'm posting in the hope that someone will quickly see what I'm missing.
Background: On Fedora 16 with KDE I'm trying out the "conky" system
monitor. One of the things I'm having it do is display the most recent
three lines of /var/log/messages every 30 seconds. The conky command is
intended to run under a user account. On Fedora, /var/log/messages is
readable only by root. So I modified the sudoers file to allow my user
account to run the tail command as root. I modified the conky
configuration file to issue sudo tail instead of tail. When I issue the
conky command from a user terminal, /var/log/messages displays. Also,
the logwatch report notes many hundreds of issuances of sudo tail for a
multihour session.
Next, I wanted to have conky automatically start when I login to KDE. I
added conky to KDE autostart. Conky runs fine except that it does not
display anything from /var/log/messages. Logwatch does not report any
sudo activity. I have open a root terminal and a user terminal and I
don't get any relevant messages, such as "permission denied". I'm
inclined to think this is a problem with permissions
to /var/log/messages, but I don't see how that would be happening.
Here is info on two of the relevant processes:
[aweiner@localhost ~]$ ps -f 2626
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY STAT TIME CMD
aweiner 2626 2520 0 16:01 ? Sl 0:06 conky
[aweiner@localhost ~]$ ps -f 2520
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY STAT TIME CMD
aweiner 2520 1629 0 16:00 ? S
0:00 /bin/bash /home/aweiner/.kde/Autostart/conky_startup.sh
Any ideas on what's happening differently in the autostart case?
Is there anything illuminating in ~/.xsession-errors ? On most distros
the window manager writes stderr to that file so that you can debug
things like this.
-Sean
--
Sean Dague Learn about the Universe with the
sean at dague dot net Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association
http://dague.net http://midhudsonastro.org
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