The following small trick was too simple for a post in my eyes, but too helpful in the past for not sharing. From time to time a I have a long running command in my development process, that can be compiling, evaluating data or something else that takes longer than 5 minutes. In the most cases I will focus on something else in that time and check pretty late that the command has already finished. A simple solution for me is to play some audio signal after the command has finished.
The idea is pretty simple and works also on other operating systems with other music playing commands. I just append a command that plays a audio track after the long runnign command.
I have choosen the command play from the package sox in Debian based systems. The package
can be installed with super user permissions by the following command.
apt-get install soxA audio file can be played with the following command.
play 02.\ Jane\ Became\ Insane.ogg
02. Jane Became Insane.ogg:
File Size: 2.97M Bit Rate: 144k
Encoding: Vorbis
Channels: 2 @ 16-bit Track: 2 of 11
Samplerate: 44100Hz Album: .limbo messiah
Replaygain: off Artist: Beatsteaks
Duration: 00:02:45.04 Title: Jane Became Insane
In:100% 00:02:45.04 [00:00:00.00] Out:7.28M [ | ] Clip:0
Done.
Let us assume that sleep 5 represents our long running command. We just need to append the
play command and we will be reminded with audio after the long running command has finished.
sleep 5; play 02.\ Jane\ Became\ Insane.ogg
This idea can get more and more comfortable. Here just as example a bash script that takes every command and appends
the play command afterwards.
#!/bin/bash
$*; play -q /usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alerts/drip.ogg
We can place this script as file arem for audio reminder as executable in
/usr/local/bin/ for example and can provided this as pre command for every long
running command.
arem sleep 5