Trying to run sh script at boot without gui....please help

Question

i've been searching for hours trying to find a solution to this, what should be a simple problem. I've setup my pi to run a sh script at startup that uses omxplayer to play a folder full of videos. this works perfectly fine when booting to the desktop, but between every video, it flashes the desktop for a second or so until the next video loads. i'd like to boot to cli and have this script run but i can't seem to figure out how. If i boot to cli (auto login as pi) and run the script manualy, it works perfectly fine.

currently, my script is at /home/pi/Documents/slideshow.sh

i tried:

sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

and added the line

@sh /home/pi/Documents/slideshow.sh

which works fine in the gui but not when booting to cli. i've also tried using /etc/rc.local instead, but it also doesn't work at the cli.

i installed unclutter to hide the mouse cursor, which works, but even though the taskbar is set to autohide, it still shows up between every video.

are there any startup locations i can use to call a sh script that will launch when booting to the cli?

Answer 1

As far as I understand you are booting to the command line interface and have an auto login of user pi. On start of a login shell the file ~/.profile is executed. So you can try to append at the end of the file:

~/Documents/slideshow.sh &

The & at line end ensures that the script is send to the background and ~/.profile finishes. Otherwise the login will stuck and you don't get a login prompt.