Linux Desktop Hacks

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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 ...