Pop-Up Notification when time reaches 4:00PM?

Question

I was wondering if there was a way to display a notification or something from the command line at a certain time. Like when the clock strikes 4:00pm. It would be nice if it would display it using Ubuntu's notify-osd tool:

Answer 1

As many of the other commenters said, the best way to do this on a daily basis is to use cron, but if you are only wanting to do it for one day, or sporadically, you can use the at command:

echo 'notify-send "Work day is done!"' | at 4:00PM

You can use at in a variety of ways, including as a tea timer:

echo 'notify-send "Get your tea!"' | at now + 3 minutes 
echo 'notify-send "Meeting in 1 hour with the big boss!"' | at 1pm tomorrow

It's quite useful for those one-off commands.

Check the at manpage for more syntax goodness.

Answer 2

Use notify-send to send the notification. Set it up as a cron job.

Answer 3

You can send commands to notify-osd like so:

notify-send "Go to bed!"

A crontab for daily notification at 4pm would look like so:

0 16 * * * /home/username/notify.sh

Answer 4

You can always set up a cron job to run a script @ 0400hrs. The tricky thing here, is to find out what command to use to popup a window (ala net send for windows), or to do anything to notify you to go off to bed.

notify-osd doesn't seem to support command-line prompt generation, you might want to try LinPopup2...

Answer 5

Looks like you are using gnome-do. There are a few plugins there that can be used - remember the milk (RTM) is one.