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Send User Notifications on Mac OS X 10.8 from the command-line.

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terminal-notifier

terminal-notifier is a command-line tool to send Mac OS X User Notifications, which are available in Mac OS X 10.8 and higher.

Caveats

  • Under OS X 10.8, the Notification Center always uses the application’s own icon, there’s currently no way to specify a custom icon for a notification. The only way to use this tool with your own icon is to use the -sender option or include a build of terminal-notifier with your icon and a different bundle identifier instead. (If you do not change the bundle identifier, launch services will use a cached version of the icon.)
    Consequently the -appIcon & -contentImage options aren't doing anything under 10.8.
    However, you can use unicode symbols and emojis. See the examples.

  • It is currently packaged as an application bundle, because NSUserNotification does not work from a ‘Foundation tool’. radar://11956694

  • If you intend to package terminal-notifier with your app to distribute it on the MAS, please use 1.5.2 since 1.6.0+ uses a private method override which is not allowed in the AppStore guidelines.

Download

Prebuilt binaries are available from the releases section.

Or if you want to use this from Ruby, you can install it through RubyGems:

$ [sudo] gem install terminal-notifier

You can also install it via Homebrew:

$ brew install terminal-notifier

Usage

$ ./terminal-notifier.app/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -[message|group|list] [VALUE|ID|ID] [options]

In order to use terminal-notifier, you have to call the binary inside the application bundle.

The Ruby gem, which wraps this tool, does have a bin wrapper. If installed you can simply do:

$ terminal-notifier -[message|group|list] [VALUE|ID|ID] [options]

This will obviously be a bit slower than using the tool without the wrapper.

Some examples are:

$ echo 'Piped Message Data!' | terminal-notifier -sound default
$ terminal-notifier -title '💰' -message 'Check your Apple stock!' -open 'http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL'
$ terminal-notifier -group 'address-book-sync' -title 'Address Book Sync' -subtitle 'Finished' -message 'Imported 42 contacts.' -activate 'com.apple.AddressBook'

Options

At a minimum, you have to specify either the -message , the -remove or the -list option.


-message VALUE [required]

The message body of the notification.

Note that if this option is omitted and data is piped to the application, that data will be used instead.


-title VALUE

The title of the notification. This defaults to ‘Terminal’.


-subtitle VALUE

The subtitle of the notification.


-sound NAME

The name of a sound to play when the notification appears. The names are listed in Sound Preferences. Use 'default' for the default notification sound.


-group ID

Specifies the ‘group’ a notification belongs to. For any ‘group’ only one notification will ever be shown, replacing previously posted notifications.

A notification can be explicitely removed with the -remove option, describe below.

Examples are:

  • The sender’s name to scope the notifications by tool.
  • The sender’s process ID to scope the notifications by a unique process.
  • The current working directory to scope notifications by project.

-remove ID [required]

Removes a notification that was previously sent with the specified ‘group’ ID, if one exists. If used with the special group "ALL", all message are removed.


-list ID [required]

Lists details about the specified ‘group’ ID. If used with the special group "ALL", details about all currently active messages are displayed.

The output of this command is tab-separated, which makes it easy to parse.


-activate ID

Specifies which application should be activated when the user clicks the notification.

You can find the bundle identifier of an application in its Info.plist file inside the application bundle.

Examples are:

  • com.apple.Terminal to activate Terminal.app
  • com.apple.Safari to activate Safari.app

-sender ID

Specifying this will make it appear as if the notification was send by that application instead, including using its icon.

Using this option fakes the sender application, so that the notification system will launch that application when the notification is clicked. Because of this it is important to note that you cannot combine this with options like -execute and -activate which depend on the sender of the notification to be ‘terminal-notifier’ to perform its work.

For information on the ID see the -activate option.


-appIcon PATH [10.9+ only]

Specifies The PATH of an image to display instead of the application icon.

WARNING: This option is subject to change since it relies on a private method.


-contentImage PATH [10.9+ only]

Specifies The PATH of an image to display attached inside the notification.

WARNING: This option is subject to change since it relies on a private method.


-open URL

Specifies a resource to be opened when the user clicks the notification. This can be a web or file URL, or any custom URL scheme.


-execute COMMAND

Specifies a shell command to run when the user clicks the notification.

License

All the works are available under the MIT license. Except for ‘Terminal.icns’, which is a copy of Apple’s Terminal.app icon and as such is copyright of Apple.

Copyright (C) 2012-2013 Eloy Durán eloy.de.enige@gmail.com

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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Send User Notifications on Mac OS X 10.8 from the command-line.

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