How do I make iTerm terminal notify me when a job/process is complete?

Question

A notification center notification would be ideal but growl, bounce dock, sound, etc would be fine, too (or if this can only be done in Terminal.app I\'d be willing to switc

Answer 1

iTerm2 supports Growl notifications. You can turn it on in each profile settings.

Select a profile in Preferences…->Profiles. Then in Terminal tab there is an option Enable Growl Notifications.

Remember to also enable iTerm notifications in Growl preferences.

If you want to get notification for a given process you could try to experiment with Triggers. You define triggers in Advanced tab in a profile settings. In this way you may assign a Growl notification to a particular output of your process (regexp).

You could for example do:

$ mycommand; echo "end-of-my-process"

And connect trigger to "end-of-my-process" message.

Update

Read more about triggers on iTerm2.com.

Answer 2

You can add any one of the following after any command, with a semi-colon in between the command and it:

afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Ping.aiff -v 2

osascript -e 'beep 3'

tput bel

or, if you like Notification Centre

osascript -e 'display notification "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" with title "Title"'

You can also make an alias in your profile, called notify and add that at the end of your command. So, in your login profile

alias notify="tput bel"

then

sleep 10; notify

Or, if you started your command and it is "hanging", just type notify and hit Enter and it will run your notify alias at the end, whne the command has finished, e.g.

sleep 20

# wait 5 seconds before realising this will take 20 seconds
notify<Enter>

Answer 3

Install the iTerm2 shell integration

curl -L https://iterm2.com/shell_integration/install_shell_integration_and_utilities.sh | bash

Execute your command and concatenate the attention app, e.g.

./task && ~/.iterm2/it2attention once

It'll cause the iTerm app to bounce it's icon once the job is complete.

You also have other attention options:

$ .iterm2/it2attention -h
Usage:
  it2attention start
    Begin bouncing the dock icon if another app is active
  it2attention stop
    Stop bouncing the dock icon if another app is active
  it2attention once
    Bounce the dock icon once if another app is active
  it2attention fireworks
    Show an explosion animation at the cursor

Answer 4

And you can always use the say command.

Usually when you are running a long process inside the terminal and want to get updated you can simply use this command to speak out things like done or error or bazinga.

mvn clean install; say done 

This command builds a java spring app, and takes a long long time, and it will speak out done after the process is complete.

Answer 5

Notify on already running processes:

Shortcut: ⌥⌘ A or:

Edit -> Marks and Annotations -> Alerts -> Alert on next mark

: iTerm will literally keep an eye (on the top right corner) of your terminal. Once the command is finished, it will contact the Notification Center.

Why?

Command was already launched, completion time was underestimated, and we don't want to cancel the command or wait for its completion. (i.e., brew update after a long time)

Requirements

iTerm: Shell Integration:

iTerm2 -> Install Shell Integration

Note that the integration will not show notifications until iTerm2 is restarted.

Answer 6

You can also use terminal-notifier which use mac os system notifications. To install it via Home brew just:

$ brew install terminal-notifier

Then if you want to display notification when your job/process is done use something like this

$ <your job/process command> && echo 'Completed' | terminal-notifier -sound default

And this display like this:

You can also change sound and icon of notifications. More info in github repo: https://github.com/julienXX/terminal-notifier