Comments on: Update Pidgin IM status on Ubuntu using cron

By: Earl Ruby

Earl Ruby — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:48:02 +0000

“source” is a shell script command. We’re using bash in these examples.

By: ⬡

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 07:25:35 +0000

Right on, but is there a way to call “source” from within a program?

By: Earl Ruby

Earl Ruby — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:57:24 +0000

Good solution, that’s much simpler. However, DBUS can leave old files in place in that directory (after a system crash, for example), so you want to make sure you’re sourcing the latest file. You could do something like:

for file in `ls -1tr ~/.dbus/session-bus/`; do
    source "$file"
done

… the last file sourced is always the latest file.

By: jeroen

jeroen — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:48:37 +0000

like johnkzin suggest, you don’t need to dump the environment to a file.
But there is an even better method
simply read the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS variable from the file in ~/.dbus/session-bus/

for example simply include the following in your bash script

#!/bin/bash
…
for file in ~/.dbus/session-bus/*;do
source “$file”
done

…

By: Earl Ruby

Earl Ruby — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:08:10 +0000

Exit Pidgin.

Edit the ~/.purple/status.xml file and get rid of the 50 copies of the same status message.

Restart Pidgin.

Set your current status to the one you want to update / remember.

Get the internal Pidgin status ID with:

/usr/bin/purple-remote “PurpleSavedstatusGetCurrent()”

To set that status with a message, without creating a duplicate entry, enter:

STATUS=[the id number]
/usr/bin/purple-remote “PurpleSavedstatusSetMessage($STATUS, At lunch)”

You can find more info here:

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/DbusHowto

By: Hmmm

Hmmm — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:41:06 +0000

How do I set it to one of my saved statuses, so there aren’t 50 copies of the same status in my drop-down box?

By: johnkzin

johnkzin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:04:56 +0000

You don’t need to dump the environment to a file. You can use something like:

ps -e e | grep pidgin | grep -v grep

If you’re creative, you could even take that output and suck it into a script that finds just the correct variable so you can assign it to something. Like via invoking it with “

By: wearzeep

wearzeep — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:49:57 +0000

Thank you so very very much! I have been trying to do this all day, this really helped me, it took a pretty long while for me to find this post.
Thanks again.

By: Earl Ruby

Earl Ruby — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:03:30 +0000

Glad you found this useful. I just installed Skype at home and at work and found that this technique also works for starting up Skype, so if someone calls my Skype phone the computer where I’m located is the one that currently has Skype running.

By: ubuntukungfu

ubuntukungfu — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:28:08 +0000

Hi – this is a great tip! I wonder if you might submit a link to any other tips you write to ubuntukungfu.org? This aims to be the biggest repository of Ubuntu tips. Cheers!