36

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:

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Gareth
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Kredns
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6 Answers6

53

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.

SDsolar
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jamuraa
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15

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

Community
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12

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
0

if you use a program like anacron (warns you even if the computer is not running so useful more than cron for desktops and notebooks etc ) um then i use Zenity its a notification program here is my site for it with a few examples http://sites.google.com/site/venvirupa/yadandyin

stephen P
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0

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...

caliban
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-1

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

Abhinav
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