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Undistract me

·2 mins

Here’s a thing that happens a lot to me: I’m doing some work, and as part of that work I need to run a command in my terminal that takes a little while. I run the command, look at it for about a second and then switch to doing something else – checking email, perhaps. I get deeply involved in my email checking, and then about twenty minutes later I switch back to the terminal and see the command has finished. For all I know, it finished nineteen minutes ago, and I was just too engrossed to notice it.

This is a big productivity sink for me, especially if the command happened to fail and need retrying. I’m not disciplined enough to just sit and watch the command, and I’m not prescient enough to add something to each invocation telling me when a command is done. What I want is something that alerts me whenever long running commands finish.

Well, that thing now exists, thanks to glyph’s script that provides precmd and postcmd support to bash and a lot of help from Chris Jones of Terminator.

To use it right now:
$ bzr co lp:~jml/+junk/shell-tools
$ . shell-tools/long-running.bash
$ notify_when_long_running_commands_finish_install

You’ll see that if you run a command that takes over 30 seconds to complete, it will pop up a notification, which should hopefully take you away from whatever it was you are doing and back to the task at hand.

If you look at the code, you’ll see that it installs two hooks: precmd and preexec. preexec runs just before the shell launches a command, and precmd runs just before it prompts for the next command. Our preexec stores when the command was launched and the precmd checks to see if it finished within a certain time frame. If not, it sends out a notification.

Currently, you’ll get a notification when you finish reading a long document, since the command finishes a long time after the command starts. Obviously this isn’t ideal. I think the fix is to only send notifications when the shell doesn’t have focus. Unfortunately, that’s a little tricky and I think is going to be highly terminal specific.

Anyway, I’m a total shell newbie, so I’d love to know if there’s any way this could be done better.  Also let me know if you find this useful, or you know of someone who has already done this.

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