bash-bgnotify

Cross-platform background notifications for long running commands! Supports OSX and Ubuntu linux.

Forked from Tim O'Brien's awesome zsh-background-notify and slightly modified for Bash.

How to use!

1. Install Bash-Preexec following the instructions on https://github.com/rcaloras/bash-preexec#install
2. Clone the repository:

• git clone https://github.com/zhengpd/bash-bgnotify.git ~/.bash-bgnotify

3. And add one line your .bashrc:

• source $HOME/.bash-bgnotify/bgnotify.plugin.bash

4. Done!

Requirements:

• On OS X you'll need terminal-notifer
  • brew install terminal-notifier (or gem install terminal-notifier)
• On ubuntu you're already all set!
• On windows you can use notifu or the Cygwin Ports libnotify package

Configuration

One can configure a few things:

• bgnotify_threshold sets the notification threshold time (default 6 seconds)
• function notify_formatted lets you change the notification

Use these by adding a function definition before the your call to source. Example:

bgnotify_threshold=4  ## set your own notification threshold

function notify_formatted {
  ## $1=exit_status, $2=command, $3=elapsed_time
  [ $1 -eq 0 ] && title="Holy Smokes Batman!" || title="Holy Graf Zeppelin!"
  bgnotify "$title -- after $3 s" "$2";
}

source $HOME/.bash-bgnotify/bgnotify.plugin.bash

How it works

Bash-Preexec provides two hook functions for Bash in the style of Zsh: preexec that runs before executing a command and precmd that runs just before re-prompting. Timing the difference between them gives you execution time!

To check if you're in the background we can use xprop to find the NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW in ubuntu and osascript to run a simple apple script to get the same thing (although slower).