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Chapter 4, Related to X
#27 Make Applications Trigger On-Screen Alerts
HACK
The next part of the bash script creates a unique filename based on the cur-
rent time. Then it creates the first line of the bash script (
#!/bin/bash) and
writes it to the reminder file that will run at the proper time.
Next, it adds the on-screen display command, which substitutes “Call your
boss now” for the second argument,
$2. It makes the reminder script execut-
able, and finally, it schedules the computer to run your reminder program
with the
at command, which uses the time at which you typed the com-
mand as your first argument. The time argument is flexible, by the way. You
can type the time as 2:00PM, 2pm, or even 14:00. The script adds
today for
you, although if you are ambitious, you can rewrite the script to let you cre-
ate reminders for specific dates in the future.
If you look carefully at the script, you can see that it stores files as some-
thing such as ~/reminders/reminder-2004-10-04-05-07-39. Note that the
symbol ~ refers to your home directory, so it is storing all the reminders in
the reminders subdirectory just below your home directory. If you like this
script and use it often, this directory will fill up with those temporary
reminder script files. They don’t take up much space, so that shouldn’t be
much of a concern. But if you want to clean out old reminders, you can do
so by checking the filenames ...