Cron is a time-based job scheduler to run commands, gui applications, shell scripts etc. This howto explains running a GUI application using cron. Cron can be used to automate downloading by starting some applications like wget,gwget,rtorrent,deluge... at a specified time. In Ubuntu and Debian based systems cron is run as a deamon. Type the following command in terminal to check whether cron is running:

 $ ps ax| grep "cron"
 2739 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
 3984 pts/0    S+     0:00 grep cron

Note: The second line of the output specfies our searching.

If not installed install it from the repository. Follow this link... to know how to configure cron.

env DISPLAY=:0 gui_appname

The env DISPLAY=:0 portion will tell cron to use the current display (desktop) for the program "gui_appname".

For example to run the rtorrent client(A terminal based popular torrent client in Linux) the crontab looks like this

# m h  dom mon dow   command
47 09 18 11 * env DISPLAY=:0 gnome-terminal -e rtorrent

Which tells to run rtorrent to be run in terminal at Nov 18 at 09:47 AM on all days.

If the application is deluge torrent client replace "gnome-terminal -e rtorrent" with deluge. -l switch can be used to list the current cron jobs.

$ crontab -l
# m h  dom mon dow   command
47 09 18 11 * env DISPLAY=:0 deluge

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