Cron not executing command

Question

I am running Debian sid.

I'm trying to get audacious to start up and play an online radio station at 9 AM on Mon, Tue, Wed, & Thu every week. I have the station URL saved in a pls file which I downloaded from the station website itself, and I have confirmed that audacious plays it. But I can't get cron to start it. In my crontab I've tried:

0 9 * * 1-4 audacious /home/ryan/Music/WSMR_Radio.pls

and

0 9 * * 1-4 'audacious /home/ryan/Music/WSMR_Radio.pls'

and

0 9 * * 1-4 "audacious /home/ryan/Music/WSMR_Radio.pls"

with no luck. What am I doing wrong? I'm not finding my mistake in info crontab(5).

I suppose some might respond, "Don't use cron, use [this other tool]," but I'd still like to know how to use cron correctly, for future reference at the very least.

Answer 1

Use cron, use audacious but with other tool called:

audtool --playback-play

Audacious hasn't got autoplay feature after adding playlist as i know. So leave audacious running whole night, then cron will push the play button with audtool.

Answer 2

I tried crontab entries with and without the full path to audacious, tried both of them un-, single-, and double-quoted, and nothing worked. I made sure audacious gave me no errors when run manually from the command line. Then I tried the crontab line with 'mpv' instead of 'audacious', without its full path, and unquoted, and it worked. Probably the crontab line was fine, and there is some other problem happening, perhaps with audacious. I will accept this as the answer

Answer 3

I too had to use mpv for a while, but then found a working solution for starting audacious from cron. First check your display variable:

env | grep DISPLAY

In your case (and assuming that DISPLAY=:0.0) the crontab entry would be as follows:

0 9 * * 1-4 env DISPLAY=:0.0 audacious '/home/ryan/Music/WSMR_Radio.pls'

Source: https://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/cron-alarm-clock/