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If you can read me, I'm broken!

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Link: πŸ” See Original Answer on Ask Ubuntu ⧉ πŸ”—

URL: https://askubuntu.com/q/1393684 ID: /2022/02/18/
Created: February 18, 2022    Edited:  February 21, 2022
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A more universal way of locking the screen is using:

loginctl lock-session

Cron doesn’t know the Session ID for loginctl

When you use loginctl lock-session from the command line, your session ID is already known. For example:

$ echo $XDG_SESSION_ID

c2

$ loginctl list-sessions

   SESSION        UID USER             SEAT            
        c2       1000 rick             seat0           

1 sessions listed.

The above shows two ways you can get your Session ID from the command line.

This GitHub issue for loginctl explains why the variable XDG_SESSION_ID is unknown to systemd. The same case would apply to cron:

So from cron you could use loginctl lock-session c2 if you knew your session ID would always be c2. An easier way is to use lock-sessions.

I tried this on my system and it works. Try using this on your crontab -e:

*/5  *   *  *   *     loginctl lock-sessions

Now, every five minutes your screen will lock.

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