I'm trying to compose a command to send unix output to my desktop notifications using the notify-send cl tool. I have the following command:
mocha -w | while read SPAM_OUT; do notify-send -t 5000 "mocha:" "$SPAM_OUT"; done
Which does what I want, except that I'd like it to spit out the entirety of mocha's output in a single notification every time mocha barfs out some new stuff. Right now, I get a notification for every single line, which is profoundly annoying.
If there are any tools which should already do this for me, I'd be interested in them too.
This should do what you expect:
notify-send -t 5000 "mocha:" "$(mocha -w)"
This puts the complete output of mocha -w in the fourth argument of notify-send
If mocha -w does not terminate, the bash-specific read -t comes in handy:
mocha -w | ( while true; do MSG=""; while read -t .1 LINE; do MSG="$MSG $LINE"; done; if [ "$MSG" != "" ]; then notify-send -t 5000 "$MSG"; fi; done; )
This aggregates all lines which come in in the timeframe of 1/10th second in one message. You can adjust this timeout to fit your needs. Note that this is bash-specific, other shells (i.e. dash) may not support it.