Linux notify script

Question

I want to write a script in Linux which will notify me every half an hour by some alert message or something, whenever I'm logged onto the system. how can I do something like that on OS level?? It's a mixture of cronjob and javascipt alert message. how can I do it?

• Jonathon Reinhart: You've already indicated that you know about cron. Go forth and program!
• Praful Bagai: I can run a cron job, but how will I to throw an alert message? Any idea?

Answer 1

I found a solution :-

import sys
import pynotify
if __name__ == "__main__":
 if not pynotify.init("icon-summary-body"):
 sys.exit(1)
 n = pynotify.Notification("Heading","content","notification-message-im")
 n.show()

and then run a cronjob

Answer 2

Do you need the notification in a window environment or just a notification in some way? The easiest would probably be to use cronjobs MAILTO tag to define a recipient to the output of the executed script.

Like so:

[email protected]
* * * * bash ~/test.sh

Alternatively, you could just make the computer beep in different patterns at different times using cron. On Ubuntu at least, there's a utility called beep that should make this very easy.

• Praful Bagai: I dont want my mail-box to get filled with the messages. I rather want it in a window environment (just like a popup). Any idea ?? how will I do it?

Answer 3

A simple way for having a script writing you a message every half hour on your shell would be, in C :

 void main()
 {
 while (1) {
 sleep(1800);
 printf("My Message \n"); }
 }

Compiling this using gcc

 gcc myfile -o my_script && chmod +x my_script

Open your main terminal & write :

./my_script &

You'll keep working on your shell, and every half hour, your message will pop up; you can use stringformats to include beeps in the printf for example, or just go do whatever you'd like instead.

---

Edit: For printing a pop-up in your system, you'll need to use kdialog -like tools, i'll be printing an example with kdialog, since that is working on my system, but things like gtk-dialog-info or else might work aswell :

#!/bin/sh
while :
do
kdialog --msgbox "MyMessage";
sleep 1800;
done

And doing in the shell :

sh myscript.sh &

• Praful Bagai: Thanks Mekap for for a quick response, but I dont want my message to printed on the terminal, but rather like a alert(pop-up). Any idea regarding that?
• Mekap: Yes, i'm editing my message right now. Please tell me what linux are you on.
• Mekap: Alright ! Use Zenity instead of kdialog then ! Zenity is an ubuntu package you'll find easily.
• whereswalden: This solution has several flaws: it re-invents the wheel, it doesn't work outside of the terminal its run in, and it's not terribly portable. Better to use built-in tools in Linux like cron.
• Mekap: @whereswalden Was willing to give a cron-free solution, since it sounded to me that he doens't wanted to use cron.

Answer 4

I think what you're looking for is a mixture of cron and write. Keep in mind that though it does allow you to send messages to terminals, receiving a message can mess things up in fullscreen programs (e.g vim or emacs).

EDIT: if you want a window to pop up, I recommend xmessage or zenity

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=876618

• Praful Bagai: I tried, and they worked, but is there something like a notification message (that appears in the top right corner of the screen) but not a dialog box?

Answer 5

Put the following in your user-level crontab. You can open it by typing crontab -e in your terminal.

30 * * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 notify-send "Red alert" "All personnel must evacuate"

notify-send will display a GUI notification. It needs the DISPLAY env variable to be correctly set to the display you're logged on (most likely :0.0). (For some GUI apps, you might need additional env variables such as DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS). For testing purposes, replace 30 with * to get that message every minute, rather than each 30th minute.

More on: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto