Perl Hacking my Gnome Backgrounds

[aphenine]

One of the other things I managed to do was to write a short Perl script that cycles my background under gnome to a random image from a folder, again something I thought beyond my ability. I find it ironic that I've used a lot of Perl to write simple system scripts, amongst them some installation and maintenance scripts for the Tsunami Beowulf

Comments

[pseudomonas]

invoke it in ~/.bash_profile, if you're using bash. otherwise your favourite shell will have a magic file equivalent.

[aphenine]

Hmm, I'd thought of that, but didn't know a few things, so I didn't try it.

What I'm not sure about is when ~/bash_profile is run. Is it like ~/bashrc which runs with every shell invocation? Does it only run once for each instance of bash under my user? Does it run multiple times if I log in on different vts?

[pseudomonas]

Um, not sure. It usually does what I want, I think. I know that's not terribly helpful. I like putting echo commands in these files so I can see what's starting when.

[aphenine]

Ok, thanks for trying anyway. I found out that I could do it via GDM.

(In case you're interested: I added it to /etc/gdm/PostLogin as the Default script and that works so far. I had to add a line asking the username and also a chown at the end.)