Gfrktyl

#!/bin/bash



for i in {1..10}; do 

    timeout 1 gnome-screensaver-command -l

done

Running this as a one-line command in the terminal (without #!/bin/bash) will keep locking my pc for 10 seconds, and unlocking it is impossible. This is desired.

However, when I run this via script, it only locks it once, but after that I can immediately unlock and use the pc. Please help me.. I want to automate it and use it as a cron job. How to make it work?

This is all I have in my cron file:

1 * * * * for i in {1..5}; do timeout --foreground 1 gnome-screensaver-command -l; done > test

It won't even run the job. No test file appears. When I run service cron status, no job is run recently, even though I commanded it to run the script every minute..

A bigger question is why are you running the command 10 times for 1 second, instead of 1 time for 10 seconds? You wouldn't even need the loop then. If it's to stop someone else from entering the password and unlocking the computer, maybe you should just change the password and keep it to yourself.

There's software to help manage time, you might want to try one, like Pomodoro:

This GNOME app helps to manage time according to Pomodoro Technique. It intends to improve productivity and quality of work by reminding you to take short breaks.

Pomodoro Technique is based on two principles:

• focusing on work for limited time, about half an hour,


• clearing your mind during breaks.

This workflow can improve focus, physical health and mental agility depending on how you spend your breaks and how strictly you follow the routine.

See this question on askubuntu Is there a Pomodoro app available?, it also recommends tomate among others.

If you wanted to "stop" a particular program for a while, you could use kill -STOP pid, or pkill -STOP pattern, as in

kill -STOP pid

sleep $seconds

kill -CONT pid

Stopping whatever program you want to take a break from would let the rest of the system keep working. I wouldn't really want to try stopping something more major, like the window manager or X/xorg.

Cron doesn't behave exactly like your regular user's terminal does, it might not even know where some commands are. You could try:

• Running the command as your user, via sudo -u [YourUser] command (see man sudo for more info on -u).




• Add the full path to the command (found via which [command] or searching the package's installed files with dpkg or apt/synaptic, etc.

Sounds like timeout behaves differently when it's run in an interactive terminal, vs in a script. Reading it's info page reveals an option I think you could use:

‘--foreground’

Don’t create a separate background program group, so that the
managed COMMAND can use the foreground TTY normally. This is
needed to support timing out commands not started directly from an
interactive shell, in two situations.

1. COMMAND is interactive and needs to read from the terminal for
   example


2. 
   

   the user wants to support sending signals directly to COMMAND
   from the terminal (like Ctrl-C for example)

   
   
   

   Note in this mode of operation, any children of COMMAND will not be
   timed out. Also SIGCONT will not be sent to COMMAND, as it’s
   generally not needed with foreground processes, and can cause
   intermittent signal delivery issues with programs that are monitors
   themselves (like GDB for example).