Running Shell Script after boot on Raspberry PI

Question

I'm making a web kiosk display board using a raspberry pi and I want to send some key strokes to the browser window 2 minutes after it's loaded. The script sends the logon details for a webserver.

I've got a script that sends the keystrokes which works fine from the telnet console:

#!/usr/bash
username="username"
password="password"
echo "Setting Display"
export DISPLAY=:0
echo "Sending Username"
for char in $(sed -E s/'(.)'/'\1 '/g <<<"$username"); do
    xdotool key $char
done
xdotool key Tab
echo "Sending Password"
for char in $(sed -E s/'(.)'/'\1 '/g <<<"$password"); do
    xdotool key $char
done
xdotool key Return
echo "Waiting 5 Seconds"
sleep 5
echo "Setting Remember Password"
xdotool key Tab
xdotool key Tab
xdotool key Return
echo "Finished"

I've tried to add bash /home/pi/logon.sh to the rc.local file - but it doesn't send the keystrokes to the browser?

Does any one know why that would be? As I say - it works fine from the telnet window if I run the script, but it doesn't work when run from boot.

I had sleep 120 on the line before it to stop if firing right away and wait until the browser has loaded - and I know the script is running from rc.local, because when I remove the sleep command, I see the echos from the script.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The reason it wasn't working was because the script needed to be run as the user pi.

I changed the code in the rc.local script to this: su - pi -c "bash /home/pi/logon.sh &"

This makes the script run as the user pi and the ampersand is used to make the script run separate to the rc.local script by forking it. (http://hacktux.com/bash/ampersand)

Answer 2

Put this in your crontab

@reboot /path/to/script

Edit it using

#crontab -e