Unwanted notifications - how to track a source?

raczek · 2017-11-05 10:55:47

Just recently some unwanted notifications started appearing and I have no idea how to disable them. Help will be appreciated!

Every minute I get a notification with a current date and time:
Unwanted notification

How do I track down which application/process sends these notifications?

The problem is: it seems that these notifications does NOT use D-Bus. I've tried running a script that logs org.freedesktop.Notifications interface as mentioned on https://askubuntu.com/a/770249 but without success - log stays empty. I've tried running dbus-monitor in terminal. No messages appeared, yet still, the notification was displayed. On the other hand, manually calling "notify-send test" resulted in messages in D-Bus.

I've also tried reinstalling dunst - no effect.

I'm not sure which information would be helpful to debug this problem, but I'll provide anything on request.

Probably important info:

%uname -a
Linux n53sv_arch 4.11.3-1-custom #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Jun 8 17:23:15 CEST 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux

%pacman -Q i3-gaps dunst                                                                                                                                                        
i3-gaps 4.14.1-1                                                                                                                                                                  
dunst 1.2.0-1

Trilby · 2017-11-05 11:54:54

raczek wrote:

Every minute I get a notification...

Then it's likely a continuously running process. You should be able to pin it down quickly via elimination: look at ps, or pstree output. What don't you recognize? What can you eliminate?

If it is not it's own process, it may be a systemd timer - though I suspect you'd know about this, but you could check for those too.

raczek · 2017-11-05 12:36:04

Trilby wrote:

You should be able to pin it down quickly via elimination: look at ps, or pstree output.

Yep, that worked, thanks

Notifications were being sent as a part of a cron job.

%crontab -l
* * * * * export DISPLAY=:0 && notify-send "`date`" -t 3

Yet, I still have two questions. Maybe someone knows the answers?
1. I do remember writing this line into a crontab about few months ago and I do remember that it did not work back then. And it wasn't working for months (no notifications were printed)... What could've changed that it suddenly started working?
2. Shouldn't notify-send use D-Bus? Why dbus-monitor shows nothing?

ewaller · 2017-11-05 16:45:04

Which D-bus were you monitoring? System or session?

Arch Linux

#1 2017-11-05 10:55:47

Unwanted notifications - how to track a source?

#2 2017-11-05 11:54:54

Re: Unwanted notifications - how to track a source?

#3 2017-11-05 12:36:04

Re: Unwanted notifications - how to track a source?

#4 2017-11-05 16:45:04

Re: Unwanted notifications - how to track a source?

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