blog.michaelkelly.org

This how I know when long-running commands finish in the terminal. (I wrote this up very briefly in 2013.)

Why?

I want a way to know when long-running commands complete, or when specific commands complete. This should work whether the commands are running on my local machine, or whether I’m ssh’d into a remote host. If a build or backup command is going to take 15 minutes, it’s very easy for me to forget it’s running for hours. This solves that problem.

Background

You can emit a terminal bell by writing the ASCII BEL character, like this:

echo -e '\a'

I keep a shell script in my local bin directory, called simply beep, that runs the echo command above.

If I know ahead of time I’m going to run a long-running command, I can type:

$ long-command; beep

Or, if I’ve already started long-command, I can just type beep in the terminal. It will run right after the current command finishes. (The terminal holds onto your keyboard input and sends it immediately at the next prompt.)

Terminal emulator setup

I use foot, so I set:

[bell]
notify=yes

This means foot sends notifications like this when the terminal bell rings:

(The exact styling depends entirely on how your system is set up. This is from a roughly stock dunst configuration.)

tmux setup

If you use the tmux terminal multiplexer, you must also configure it to allow any window to ring the bell. I also turn off the visual bell:

set-option -g bell-action any
set-option -g visual-bell off

You can also examine my full tmux.conf if it’s helpful.

Alternatives/additions

• You could configure your terminal to set the “urgent hint” on Linux, which should highlight the window. This was the way to do it on old X11 setups. Wayland (used by all modern Linux desktops) seems to have been slow to adopt this, though. You could probably get this working today, but I haven’t looked into it.
• You could use notify-send on Linux machines instead of ringing the bell; this allows for richer notifications. However, you must have a different config for Linux and OS X, and the notification command must run locally. So it doesn’t help if you’re running a long command remotely over ssh.
• You can configure your shell prompt to ring the bell. As long as you turn off your audible/visual bell, this should have no effect as you’re running commands interactively, but once you’re away from the terminal, it should notify you as soon as any command completes.
• There are more ideas for how to use this mechanism in this post.

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