cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/28766034
Sorry if this kind of question isn’t allowed here, but I’m at my wit’s end. VB randomly started launching on startup about 2 weeks ago (on EndeavourOS) and I can’t figure out why. There’s no shortcut in ~/config/autostart, it isn’t in the KDE startup apps list, and I can’t find anything virtualbox-related with systemctl either. There’s also no setting in the VB app itself. WTF?
Based on recommendations in that thread, I also checked:
/etc/systemd/system
/etc/default/
vboxautostart.service
KDE “restore session” settings
Any ideas are much appreciated!
Ok that’s increadibly weird. Here’s some places I’d look.
I’d start looking in environment files such as ~/.bash_profile, .~/profile, /etc/environment, /etc/profile and a few others. Maybe there’s a call to the application in one of these files?
Secondly, I’d attempt to write a bash script to walk a directory tree, cat out files, pipe it through grep and get every instance where VirtualBox is mentioned in a file. Trying the name of proccess, or of the executable too.
I have a snippet that may help, by replacing that bash script:
grep -Rnw '~/path/to/start/' -e 'VirtualBoxOrSmthngElse'all credit to this answer on SO:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/16957078/11534230
Head there to see how to try and wittle down the matches. I’d start in a etc, ignore binary files with grep, and try everywere systematically
This is likely overkill lol. If you’re on xorg maybe there’s something in the file xorg uses for init? Can’t remember the name personally but I used it to start up some processes before on system boot quite a while ago
Move to the top of the tree you want to search and do something like this:
find . -type f -exec grep -iH “virtualboxexecutable” {} ;
That will give you what you want without the need for a script. -type f makes the find command only search files, and -exec has it run the grep command on any files it returns with -iH giving you case insensitive results showing you the file it’s found in. Substitute ‘virtualboxexecutable’ with whatever the process name is that is being run. If you want to ignore binary files, the add in "| grep -iv “binary file matches” to the command. That will strip out any results where it has searched a binary file.
Thanks for this, I gave it a shot but all I find it a bunch of timeshift files. I’m also not sure where to search that I haven’t already looked at.