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Asked: 2019-09-29 11:33:25 +0800 CST

How to find out what autostarted a program?

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There is lots of advice on how to make a program autostart, but the thing I need now is the opposite of that: I want to find out why a certain program starts on boot.

The use case is as follows: After some messing around with xbindkeys I decided to shut down Ubuntu, take a snapshot of the VM, and then make xbindkeys autostart. However, xbindkeys was running already after the boot. How do I find out why?

Tried systemctl, looked into ~/.bashrc and ~/.profile. Not there. pstree says xbindkeys descends directly from systemd.

Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS.

autostart

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    when you install the package xbindkeys

    sudo apt install xbindkeys

    it creates a .desktop file in your users home directory in $HOME/.config/autostart/ with below contents

    [Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=xbindkeys
Comment=Start xbindkeys
Exec=xbindkeys_autostart
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=
GenericName=
Hidden=true

    If you observe the Exec line.. this .desktop file will execute xbindkeys_autostart which is actually /usr/bin/xbindkeys_autostart with below contents

    #!/bin/bash

set -e
set -u
set -E

PROG="/usr/bin/xbindkeys"
NOAUTO="${HOME}/.xbindkeys.noauto"

# This file autostarts xbindkeysrc if the user (or system) has a config
# for it AND does NOT Have a .xbindkeys.noauto in his homedir.

# we only run if there is no NOAUTO file
if ! [[ -f ${NOAUTO} ]] && [[ -x ${PROG} ]]; then
    # User config wins over system config
    # guile config wins over classic config
    for cfile in "/etc/xbindkeysrc" "$HOME/.xbindkeysrc" "$HOME/.xbindkeysrc.scm"; do
        if [[ -f ${cfile} ]] || [[ -L ${cfile} ]]; then
            CONF="${cfile}"
        fi
    done

    # Run $PROG - if it has been configured
    if [ -n "${CONF}" ]; then
        $PROG -f $CONF
    fi
fi

    for example manually added autostart programmes with directly entering commands in startup application list is like below

    enter image description here

    you can see the difference between both of these .desktop files for the line "Hidden" which is false for one and true for other

    enter image description here

    enter image description here

    if you make the Hidden=true to Hidden=false you can see it in GUI startupapplications list like below

    enter image description here

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