man(8)

✨ NAME ✨

okay so bestie, gather round, because we're talking about malcontent-timer-extension-agent — that's the Parental Controls Timer Extension Agent 💅 and yes she's from the man(8) section, admin-commands-only energy, very grown-up, very serious, very slay.

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🫶 SYNOPSIS 🫶

malcontent-timer-extension-agent [-a bus-address]

that's it. that's the whole summoning ritual. iconic honestly.

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so malcontent-timer-extension-agent is an agent process. and what does an agent process do, you ask? she decides whether to grant extension requests from child accounts that have screen time limits set as part of parental controls. literally the "please mom just five more minutes" of the software world 😭

this particular implementation of the agent process raises a polkit action so a parent can authorize (or reject) the screen time limit extension request using a polkit dialog on the local machine. so the parent gets a lil popup and hits yes or no. no cap.

other agent implementations may do more complex checks in future. for example — and this is just an example okay, not a promise — by messaging the parent's phone to allow them to authorize/reject requests remotely. very main character of them honestly.

and here's the thing: malcontent-timer-extension-agent is designed to be run by systemd(1), being D-Bus activated. so there should be no need to run malcontent-timer-extension-agent manually. like, please don't. she doesn't need you hovering. if you want to request screen time limit extensions from the command line, use malcontent-client(8). periodt. ✨

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

• -a, --bus-address= — address of a D-Bus message bus to connect to. 🚌 this is intended for debugging use only — i repeat, debugging only, do not make this your whole personality. (Default: The system bus.)
• -t, --inactivity-timeout= — inactivity timeout, measured in milliseconds, to wait before exiting the service if no requests have been made during that period. if you set it to 0, the timeout is disabled and the service will run indefinitely. forever girl. she'll just be there. (Default: 30 seconds.)

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🦋 ENVIRONMENT 🦋

malcontent-timer-extension-agent supports the standard GLib environment variables for debugging. and ngl, these variables are not intended to be used in production. like at all. keep them in the group chat, not in prod. 🙈

• $G_MESSAGES_DEBUG — this variable can contain one or more debug domain names to display debug output for. the value all will enable all debug output. the default is for no debug output to be enabled. so if you're seeing nothing, that's not a bug bestie, that's the vibe check passing. 💜

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🎀 EXIT STATUS 🎀

malcontent-timer-extension-agent may return one of several error codes if she encounters problems. and she will tell you which one, because she's communicative and emotionally intelligent.

• 0 — no problems occurred. 🎉 the agent ran, responded to zero or more requests, and then exited due to being explicitly closed, or timing out due to finishing all requests. she did her job and she left. queen behavior.
• 1 — an invalid option was passed to malcontent-timer-extension-agent on startup. 🙈
• 2 — the D-Bus name for malcontent-timer-extension-agent was not available. 💀
• 3 — malcontent-timer-extension-agent was run in an inappropriate environment, for example as the root user. 😭 she said not like this.

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🌈 FILES 🌈

• /lib/systemd/system/malcontent-timer-extension-agent.service — the systemd(1) service file which specifies the runtime environment for malcontent-timer-extension-agent. see systemd.service(5). this is her house, her rules, her lease agreement. 🏠

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

malcontent-client(8), malcontent-timerd(8) — the rest of the friend group, go say hi.

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💀 BUGS 💀

any bugs which are found should be reported on the project website:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pwithnall/malcontent/-/issues

do not come for her in the replies, come for her in the issue tracker. that's the respectful way to do drama. 🫶

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

GNOME Foundation, Inc. and Philip Withnall. we love them, we thank them, we stan. 💖

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⭐ COPYRIGHT ⭐

Copyright © 2025 GNOME Foundation, Inc.

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ok that's the whole page bestie, you're fully educated, you ate, no crumbs left. she's D-Bus activated, she's polkit-polite, she's leaving after 30 seconds of silence like a well-adjusted person. iykyk. 💅✨

and like, if you ever need to cite this in a paper or an argument or whatever — this was malcontent-timer-extension-agent man page, version 1.0, dated 21 Oct 2025, filed under man(8). bye pookie, go request an extension responsibly 🦋🌸🎀