Raspberry Pi bash script not functioning

Question

I have a Raspberry Pi and I picked up a tft touch screen from adafruit to play around with. In order to get it working I've had to run a few lines from from rc.local including startx which for some reason has logged me in as root@raspberrypi once the OS on the touchscreen starts working.

Once the OS is running on the touch screen, I need to run two programs, matchbox-keyboard and pianobar both of which run just fine by typing in "matchbox-keyboard", and "pianobar" from the LXTerminal.

However, if I try to add "matchbox-keyboard" or "pianobar" to rc.local under either the root rc.local or pi rc.local the programs will not run.

I tried to get around this by adding a file, keyboard.sh which I have given permissions to (chmod u+rwx keyboard.sh) to my desktop which has the lines:

#!bash
matchbox-keyboard
pianobar

The file is there, and when clicked asks me to either execute, or execute in terminal, both of which do not work.

I'm stumped. Anyone have any Ideas?

I assume you cannot run X applications from the rc.local while X is not running. Those applications need X running before they can start. — JimmyB
– JimmyB, Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 11:06
Add the full path to those programs into the *.rc file, i.e. /path/to/pianobar, or update your PATH variable to include the correct path? Also running them in the background as mentioned below may help. Good luck. — shellter
– shellter, Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 16:54

Claudio · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-24 11:09:29Z

1

I'm not sure how Debian is organized, but if rc.local is a file under /etc/rc.d the system will automatically run any commands from this file at the end of system initialization, so just filling the rc.local file with this would be enough (I'm supposing matchbox-keyboard is blocking, that's why I'm starting it on the background with the &):

matchbox-keyboard &
pianobar

Just the fact you have a keyboard.sh file at the /etc/rc.d dir doesn't mean it will get executed, even if it has +x permission. The file rc.local with exec permission, on the other hand, gets executed because it is run from /etc/rc.d/rc.M (I suppose it is like this on any Linux which uses BSD-style init scripts, like Slackware, for example).

edited Dec 24, 2013 at 11:09

answered Dec 24, 2013 at 10:57

Claudio

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