Pop-Up Notification when time reaches 4:00PM?

linux ubuntu bash notifications notify-osd

15,737

Solution 1

As many of the other commenters said, the best way to do this on a daily basis is to use cron, but if you are only wanting to do it for one day, or sporadically, you can use the at command:

echo 'notify-send "Work day is done!"' | at 4:00PM

You can use at in a variety of ways, including as a tea timer:

echo 'notify-send "Get your tea!"' | at now + 3 minutes 
echo 'notify-send "Meeting in 1 hour with the big boss!"' | at 1pm tomorrow

It's quite useful for those one-off commands.

Check the at manpage for more syntax goodness.

Solution 2

Use notify-send to send the notification. Set it up as a cron job.

Solution 3

You can send commands to notify-osd like so:

notify-send "Go to bed!"

A crontab for daily notification at 4pm would look like so:

0 16 * * * /home/username/notify.sh

15,737

arxpoetica

Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies. --Teach Yourself Programming In Ten Years

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

arxpoetica over 1 year

I was wondering if there was a way to display a notification or something from the command line at a certain time. Like when the clock strikes 4:00pm. It would be nice if it would display it using Ubuntu's notify-osd tool:
- Troggy over 14 years
  
  Do you need to know the exact second you are done with work for the day?
- arxpoetica over 14 years
  
  No. Who gets off at 4:00? I actually need to tell myself to goto bed.
- caliban over 14 years
  
  @Lucas Aardvark : LOL.
- jamuraa over 14 years
  
  I get off work at 4:00pm.. then again, I get in to work at 7am most days..
- SDsolar almost 7 years
  
  This is great. I was just asking about something like this at askubuntu.com/questions/936645/…
- SDsolar almost 7 years
  
  Here I am up still at 3:55am. I suppose I should have had this tell me to go to bed at 3. ;-) btw, can you believe you posted this 7 years and 10 months ago? Hello from the Future; July 2017.
Ryan C. Thompson over 14 years

You can't type the command on the after the invocation of "at." You have to do something like echo 'notify-send "Work day is done!"' | at 4:00PM
jamuraa over 14 years

True, I forgot about that little annoyance.
arxpoetica over 14 years

I liked your solution best because it can be easily changed and doesn't require root access to edit /etc/crontab
fixer1234 over 7 years

Welcome to Super User. External links can break or be unavailable. Please include the essential information within your answer and use the link for attribution and further reading. Thanks.
Kunok about 6 years

But that doesn't work out of box. notify-send requires some env variables whichr are not available from cron by defaualt?
Andrej Herich over 5 years

You might need to set DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable before running notify-send. See askubuntu.com/a/346580
user3439968 about 5 years

You need add DISPLAY variable to environment to work with at or cron. Type this: echo 'export DISPLAY=:0; notify-send "Enjoy!"' | at 04:00 PM .
patryk.beza almost 5 years

You need to apt install libnotify-bin to use notify-send.
nocibambi almost 3 years

Is there a way to use this from the "Run a command" (ALT + F2) prompt? notify-send works from there but echo and at does not seem to.