I have these two commands that I need to manually run every time after login:

autossh -M 2000 -N -f -q -D 127.0.0.1:7070 

and

sudo mkdir /media/C
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /media/C

I'd like to make them automatically run every time I boot and login to my computer. I'm currently using 10.04LTS.

BTW, I only vaguely know what init.d or runlevel mean. But I still prefer to know a command-line based way to achieve this, not a fancy GUI way. Also, the autossh will only succeed after Ubuntu automatically detect and connect to my network, so should we let it retry infinitely until successfully executed?

Thank you!

2 Answers

Adding the autossh Command

1. On the panel select System --> Preferences --> Startup Applications.
2. Under the Startup Programs tab select the Add button.
3. Choose any Name you want and paste in your command (the Comment is optional)
4. Click the Add button.

Note for newer versions of Ubuntu

You can find this application by searching for "Startup Applications" in the dash. Also, you can always launch it by pressing Alt + F2 (or opening a terminal) and running gnome-session-properties.

Mounting the Partition

Option 1: Add partition to /etc/fstab

• See How to mount NTFS drive at startup if it is a Windows partition.
• Ubuntu Community Fstab documentation

Option 2: Use udisks

Add this startup command as shown previously:

udisks --mount /dev/sda2

• Create a script file, e.g. named my_file.sh, in the /etc/profile.d/ directory.
• Put #!/bin/bash as the first line.
• Write whatever command(s) you want to be executed immediately after logging in, e.g. pgrep udhcpd.
• Mark your file as executable: chmod +x /etc/profile.d/my_file.sh

*It should get executed after login. In case it doesn't or you don't have the ability to use root privileges, creating the same file under ~/.config/autostart should work fine (I haven't tried this directory before).