On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 08:30:57AM +0200, MENGUAL Jean-Philippe wrote: > My purpose is to run mplayer in a crontab. My line: > > 00 00 * * * mplayer file
But your *Subject* header says "Problem pulseaudio". I presume this means you are using pulseaudio. When you invoke mplayer from cron, it does not have any of the environment variables that your desktop session sets. No DISPLAY or XAUTHORITY to talk to the X server, no TERM to define which set of terminal escape sequences to use (and no controlling terminal in the first place), and -- relevant to you -- no pulseaudio environment variables. See <https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/FAQ/#index5h3> > If I run mplayer in CLI, everything is good. If cron does it, no sound. > And log is: Audio becomes stuck! Probably because in the absence of the pulseaudio variables, mplayer cannot talk to your pulseaudio daemon. If it were *me*, I would simply remove pulseaudio and stop attempting to use it. But you probably run some kind of Desktop Environment which relies on it, so I'm guessing that's not an option for you. The second idea that comes to mind would be for you to dump your desktop session's environment variables to a file upon login, and then source that file from a bash script invoked by cron when you want to run mplayer. The problem with this is, I have no idea when or how the pulseaudio environment variables get set (since I don't use it). Thus, I don't know where to put the command to dump the variables to a file. But assuming you can figure that out, create the following *bash script* and put it somewhere: #!/bin/bash declare -px > ~/.cache/env-variables At login, arrange for it to run from *wherever* it's supposed to run from. That's the part I can't guess. Happy hunting. Then from cron, call a second *bash script* that runs this: #!/bin/bash source ~/.cache/env-variables mplayer file Do not put these commands directly inside crontab, because those commands run under sh, not bash.
