it's been so long since I fiddled with cron but from man 5 crontab
The
time and date fields are:
field allowed values
----- --------------
minute 0–59
hour 0–23
day of month 1–31
month 1–12 (or names, see below)
day of week 0–7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)
A field may be an asterisk (*), which always stands for
``first-last''.
so * * 21 * *
means launch on each minute 0-59, every hour 0-23, 21'st day of the
month, Every month
and and regardless of which day of the week the 21'st happens to fall on..
more likely you wanted 0 0 21 * *
which would have got you midnight on the 21st of each month, assuming
you were planing to delete it later today.
John Jason Jordan wrote:
Oops. Something is wrong with this line:
* * 21 * * MAILTO="" DISPLAY=:0.0 gxmessage -font "Junicode 24" Pay
T-Mobile
I expected it to pop up a message today (the 21st), and it did so, but
60 second later it opened up another one, and again every sixty seconds.
I couldn't figure out how to shut down gxmessage. It's not in Top or
Task Manager. Eventually I opened crontab again and put a # in front of
the line, then saved it and exited from the editor. That did the job,
but now I have to figure out why '* * 21 * *' repeats the message every
60 seconds.
Steve,
Thanks for the suggestion. I spent some time trying to figure out how
to do it with cron and gxmessage. I added this line to crontab:
* * 21 * * MAILTO="" DISPLAY=:0.0 gxmessage -font "Junicode 24" Pay
T-Mobile
That is, I set it at the 21st, because that's tomorrow, to see if cron
pops up the message. If I do just the gxmessage part at the command
line it pops up the message, with an 'OK' button to close the message,
so it ought to work if I got the crontab line correct.
Crossing fingers for tomorrow. :)
On Mon, 19 Dec 2022 23:42:07 -0800
Steve Dum <dr.d...@frontier.com> dijo:
my ubuntu 22.04 release comes with a program called notify_send that
does what you request
it takes a -t n option to set the time it stays on screen and totally
ignores the parameter.
However it takes a urgency argument, -u critical seems to leave the
note on screen until you delete it.
notify-send -u critical "time to write that check"
seems to do what you want. But if you do more than 1 notify-send they
appear serially so you don't see the next one
until you close the current one.
looking at the online man page, it has tabs for every supported ubuntu
version so it's been around a while.
steve
John Jason Jordan wrote:
I need an little application that will pop up a reminder on the same
day of every month, and crucially, *leave it on the screen until I
manually close the window*. There are lots of notify tools, but they
just pop up a little notice for 10-20 seconds and then the notice
disappears.
So far the only thing I have found is Remind, and its GUI tool,
Tkremind. I've installed both, and they run, but there is no
documentation other than a man page, which I can't figure out. That
is, I created a reminder, but it never appears, so clearly I haven't
done it right.
The purpose is to pay a bill that comes due every month on the 20th,
and each month with a different amount. I could set up an auto-pay
with my bank, but not if the amount varies. The vendor also has an
auto-pay option, but to use it I have to give them my credit card
number and authorization to charge it for whatever they want. No
thanks, I'm not that stupid.
I could probably figure out how to use cron, but cron needs to call a
program to do the announcement. Or at least I think it does. Cron is
a mystery to me.
Surely there exists a simple, understandable reminder app. Any
suggestions?