That is, my laptop. Since at night I keep it in the same room where I sleep, I figured that I could as well use it as an highly customizable alarm clock.

My alarm script uses rtcwake(8) from util-linux-ng to set the RTC alarm clock, suspends the computer and then plays some music at a set volume when it wakes up (if it never wakes up, check your BIOS settings). Since it uses the date(2) command it can parse the alarm time in many formats.

#!/bin/sh -e # for a random tune, list multiple space-separated files MUSIC='/home/mp3/The_Velvet_Underground/The_Velvet_Underground_&_Nico/07_Heroin.mp3' # some days I like different music DOW="$(date +%u)" if [ $DOW -eq 6 -o $DOW -eq 7 ]; then MUSIC='/home/mp3/The_Velvet_Underground/The_Velvet_Underground_&_Nico/01_Sunday_Morning.mp3' fi # choose your favourite music player player() { mpg123 --random --quiet --control --title "$@" || true; } #player() { mplayer -loop 0 "$*"; } # play the music at this volume VOLUME='50%' # ALSA mixer control used to set and restore the master volume VOLUMECTL='iface=MIXER,name="Master Playback Volume"' ############################################################################## # this is more elegant, but it needs rtcwake from util-linux-ng >= 2.14.2 rtcwake_set_alarm() { local when="$1" local rtc="$2" if [ "$rtc" ]; then rtc="--device $rtc"; fi local epochtime=$(date --date "$when" +%s) [ "$epochtime" ] || return 1 sudo rtcwake $rtc --mode no --time $epochtime } # you can use this function instead if your system lacks a working rtcwake set_alarm() { local when="$1" local rtc="$2" [ "$rtc" ] || rtc='rtc0' local epochtime=$(date --date "$when" +%s) [ "$epochtime" ] || return 1 local alarmfile="/sys/class/rtc/$rtc/wakealarm" sudo sh -c "echo 0 > $alarmfile && echo $epochtime > $alarmfile" } ############################################################################## if [ "$1" ]; then WHEN="$1" else echo "Usage: $0 WHEN" exit 1 fi set_alarm "$WHEN" # save the volume oldvolume="$(amixer cget "$VOLUMECTL" | sed -nre '/ : /s/.*=//p')" amixer -q cset "$VOLUMECTL" $VOLUME # actually here I run a script which also deals with network interfaces, # IM and IRC clients and so on sudo pm-suspend player $MUSIC # restore the volume amixer -q cset "$VOLUMECTL" "$oldvolume" exit 0