Notify Yourself After Completing a Long-Running Bash Process

Recently, I worked on projects that take a long time to build. I often stared at the screen, waiting for these to complete, which often resulted in me sleeping off at my desk. Later, I improvised sleeping while listening to some podcasts, but I usually lost valuable time since I couldn't tell when the long-running tasks were done. If only I could get notified if a bash process is done.

Say hello to the "say" command

The say command takes a string of text and reads it out loud. The example below says "brew upgrade done" when you're done upgrading your brew packages.

brew upgrade; say, "brew upgrade done."

Perhaps you often sleep off while listening to one of those monotonic dialogues between Lex Fridman and Elon; you could repeat the alert until you wake up with a little sprinkle of bash.

brew upgrade; for i in {1..1000}; do; say "brew upgrade done"; done;

That would say "brew upgrade done" 1000 times unless you manually stop it(with ctrl+c).

If you don't wake up after 1000 iterations, you should close your laptop for the weekend sleep. Just sleep 😆.

ℹ️ The say command comes preinstalled with Macos (I think), but its equivalent should be available on your Linux distro. For example, on my Ubuntu desktop installation, I have spd-say.

Alright, that's it. Have a great weekend, you all.