Is there a way to show notification from bash script in Ubuntu?

Question

Most of the application can show nicely formatted notification on events that appear on top right corner of the screen. I'm about to write a bash script that will do fairy long processing in the background and I really want to know when it is finished. How can I show that nice notification from a bash script?

Answer 1

If you're using the new notification system in Jaunty, you want the notify-send command

notify-send - a program to send desktop notifications

SYNOPSIS

With notify-send you can sends desktop notifications to the user via
a notification daemon from the command line.  These notifications can be
used to inform the user about an event or display some form of information
without getting in the user's way.

OPTIONS

-u, --urgency=LEVEL
Specifies the urgency level (low, normal, critical).

-t, --expire-time=TIME
    Specifies the timeout in milliseconds at which to expire the notification.
-i, --icon=ICON[,ICON...]
    Specifies an icon filename or stock icon to display.
-c, --category=TYPE[,TYPE...]
    Specifies the notification category.

Answer 2

For KDE users:

$ kdialog --title "Long process completed!" --passivepopup "This popup will disappear in 5 seconds" 5 &

Answer 3

Found another way, through Zenity

echo 'message:hi' | zenity --notification --listen

(This also has the benefit of already being installed on Ubuntu.)

Answer 4

In a shell script, you can also call the osd_cat utility from libxosd.

Answer 5

There's also xmessage that will pop-up a window, so it shoud work on any X11 system.

Pro: It also allows interactively prompting the user with buttons.

Con: Like any pop-up alert, it typically receives focus, so if you're in the middle of typing it can disappear before you read the message.