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? _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Feb 1 - Home Networking Made Simple with Amahi Home Server Mar 7 - March 2012 Meeting - 9th Annivesary of MHVLUG Apr 4 - An Intro to Chef
