How do I autostart an application in Gnome when a volume is mounted?

Question

According to Gnome's Desktop Application Autostart Specification, I should be able to have a program execute simply by naming it any of ".autorun", "autorun", or "autorun.sh". None of these seem to work: I get a prompt from nautilus-autorun-software asking if I want to let it run, I say "Run", and it results in a dialog that says "Error autorunning software: Cannot find the autorun program". Is it a bug or am I not doing something correctly?

The autorun file contains the following:

#! /bin/sh
gnome-terminal -x sh -c '~/bin/podcatcher/copypodcasts.sh; echo Done!; read pause'

It works if I manually run the autorun file.

The filesystem is fat, here's the mtab entry:

/dev/sdd1 /media/disk vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,showexec,flush 0 0

What type of filesystem is on the volume, and what mount options are used? What are the effective permissions on the `autorun` file? — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Nov 30 '10 at 19:28
I think there should not be a space between `#!` and `/`, eg. `#!/bin/sh` — Martin, Jun 30 '11 at 14:12
@Martin It doesn't matter. http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/shebang/#details — Shawn J. Goff, Jun 30 '11 at 18:31

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 01 '19 at 13:53

It makes no sense.

An USB drive is automatically mounted and owned by desktop user. But she must umount it and mount it again as root? I can not see a practical use for this behaviour.

Anyway, I tested this root-mount and nothing showed up on the user desktop.

If you take a look on nautilus code, the _check_file function has no default for "must_be_executable", and calls to this function do not set that parameter.

The only way I got it working was this:

format the USB drive in ext2 or ext3
put an autoexec file on it
change permissions to make this file executable by a desktop user (file can be owned by anybody)
plug the USB drive and let gnome to automount it

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 05 '11 at 20:16

1

The cd is probably mounted with the noexec option.

Login as root on a terminal umount it and mount it again as root. This time as a user in the gui autorunning the cd should work. (It does for me with VirtualBox)

edited Jul 05 '11 at 20:16

Caleb

69,278
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answered Jun 30 '11 at 14:25

Martin

11
2

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Nov 21 '14 at 02:31

"Cannot find the autorun program" may mean the file is not executable. If it's a CDROM, the autorun file has to have execute permissions. That requires Rock Ridge extensions to the ISO9660 file system at ISO image creation time.

I'm using the following procedure (NOTE: you'll need lots of disk space).

create a directory containing the files destined for the CDROM including autorun
make sure the files have execute permission. In the directory issue:
```
chmod 555 *
```
create the ISO image using mkisofs or genisoimage (these appear to be the same program).
```
genisoimage  -l -R -J -V disclabel -o directory.iso directory
```
Burn the iso to a blank CDROM using Brasero
This will yield a labeled CDROM with long file names, Joliet and RockRidge extensions.

How do I autostart an application in Gnome when a volume is mounted?

3 Answers3