It’s quite boring to keep watching the terminal till a long-running command completes. I would rather use the time doing something useful. But how do I know when the command competes? The answer on Ubuntu is a simple utility called undistract-me. It uses notify-osd to update you when a console command finishes.

Installation

To install undistract-me on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install undistract-me

Usage

On my system undistract-me did not work out of the box. I added the following in my ~/.bashrc to get it working:

. /usr/share/undistract-me/long-running.bash notify_when_long_running_commands_finish_install

By default the utility notifies you with the execution time when a command or task takes more that 10 seconds to complete. You can override it by exporting the following:

// notify if execution time > 5 seconds $ export LONG_RUNNING_COMMAND_TIMEOUT=5

If you don’t want certain commands to be ignored use the following (space separated list):

$ export LONG_RUNNING_IGNORE_LIST=mv cp rsync

On GitHub: undistract-me