The ELC Community Blog

A knowledge exchange on Ruby on Rails and Agile Development

Notify me when it's done

by Daniel Lunde on December 21, 2007

Here's a fun little tip I got while working with my client. Occasionally, when we have to run some really long processes (eg. reloading a production snapshot or running some lengthy migration), it's nice to be notified when that process is done.

Quick and dirty notifications

1) For aural feedback simply add " && say 'All Done'"

$ mysql app_dev < dump.sql && say "Finished importing"

2) For growl feedback add " && growlnotify -s -m 'All Done'"

$ mysql app_dev < dump.sql && growlnotify -s -m "Finished importing"

* The -s makes the notification stick around until you click it.
* More info about growlnotify below.

Pass or fail notifications

The purpose of && between the two commands is so that the notification will only occur if the first command is successful. You could take that a step more and send different notifications depending on the return status of the command.

$ (cmd && say "Success") || say "Failed"
$ (cmd && growlnotify -s -m "Success") || growlnotify -s -m "Failed"

* Parenthesis are important.

If you don't care about whether a command succeeds or not, you could just replace && or || with a semicolon.

$ cmd; say "Don't care how it finished, but it did"

Installing growlnotify and a Leopard hack

growlnotify is not installed by default with growl, but it's easy to install.

• Download Growl (http://growl.info/downloads.php) and open the dmg.
• Execute the command: '/Volumes/Growl 1.1.2/Extras/growlnotify/install.sh'.
  * The Growl version may be different for you.

If you are using Leopard, there's a bug with growlnotify as of version 1.1.2 that prevents growlnotify from working consistently. However, there's an easy workaround.

• Open up the Growl preference pane and select the Network tab.
• Click to enable "Listen for incoming notifications".
• Now when you run growlnotify, add the "-H localhost" option.

$ cmd && growlnotify -s -H localhost -m "Success"

A bit messy, but it works every time.