Run script on system idle

Question

I want to run some servers and whatnot on my machine but I don't want it to interfere with what I'm doing... Gaming, research, writing a paper, etc. My thought was to have a script run when the system idles as in when the screen is locked or no users are logged in. The stuff I would be running during idle would be things like a plex server, bitcoin miner or bittorrent. I can start and stop all of these things with something like "service plexd start/stop". Any ideas on how I can initiate these commands when the system goes into and comes out of idle?

Just brainstorming.. Is cron only time based or can it be activated by other variables? — leszakk, Aug 04 '14 at 03:44
possible duplicate of How to run a command or script at screen lock/unlock? — Barafu Albino, Aug 04 '14 at 06:25
@leszakk cron is nearly only time based(excepted @reboot), you should use upstart. — LittleByBlue, Aug 04 '14 at 09:20
@Barafu Albino - that thread is only half of what I want to do. I tried it thinking that it might work as a temporary solution but echo $X does not return anything for me — leszakk, Aug 04 '14 at 18:43
seems to be that the only way to tell if the screen is locked is to run something like gnome-screensaver-command --query | grep -oh "\w*active\w*" — leszakk, Aug 04 '14 at 19:20
this is interesting...http://askubuntu.com/questions/505681/unity-how-to-detect-if-the-screen-is-locked — leszakk, Aug 05 '14 at 00:10
@muru you could with the script ive made but i chose not to because i have bandwidth restrictions — leszakk, Aug 05 '14 at 03:39

leszakk · Answer 1 · 2014-08-05T04:11:50.290

2

I've created a new script to run a command upon locking and unlocking the screen because the others on the web don't work on 14.04. I set it as a startup program and added it to my sudoers file so that it can manage services on its own.

#!/bin/bash
while sleep 30s ; do
   state=$(gnome-screensaver-command --query | grep -o "\w*active\w*" >> /dev/null)
   if [[ $state == active ]]
   then
        ./start.sh
   else
        ./stop.sh
   fi
done

edited Aug 05 '14 at 04:11

answered Aug 05 '14 at 03:11

leszakk

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A couple of suggestions: if while [ 0 -le 1 ] is supposed to be an infinite loop, you can simply use while true. Better yet, in this case, while sleep 30s and skip the sleep before the done. – muru Aug 05 '14 at 03:43

Run script on system idle

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