Activating KDE 4 notifications from bash scripts

Question

I have a bash script activated by crontab and running in background. I would like to add to it the ability to send notifications during the execution. My KDE 4 desktop has a fancy notification system which pops out non-modal messages from the tray bar, and this would be perfect for my needs. So I was searching for a way to generate these notifications from a bash scripts, but I have almost no knowledge of the KDE platform and so I'm stuck. Can anybody point me to a solution?

Answer 1

kdialog's passive popup option can be used.

kdialog --passivepopup <text> <timeout>

Example:

kdialog --passivepopup 'This is a notification' 5

Answer 2

kdialog --passivepopup 'message including html' timeout

is an option for KDE where the timeout is not necessary. you can tune this even with adding a headline (--title) and so on --> see kdialog --help

on the one hand it is worth mentioning, that kdialog was installed on my openSuSE KDE4 system whereas notify-send is not installed here.

on the other hand the advantage of notify-send is that you can use it with different desktop environments

Answer 3

Confirm that notify-send works with XFCE4 (Debian-based Mint), except the <b><font color=red> didn't work for me. For some reason it made the Message body text dark grey (virtually illegible), so I left that html out and the header ('Summary') and body text both come up white.

What is cool is that you can put an absolute path to the icon your prefer -- e.g. -i '~/myapps/foobarapp/icons/64x64/64x64.png'

Answer 4

You may also use notify-send (on Debian-based systems, install the libnotify-bin package):

notify-send -i 'dialog-information' 'Summary' '<b><font color=red>Message body.'

To my best knowledge, this should work on several window managers (such as KDE and Gnome).

Edit: HTML formatting of the message will only work with certain notification daemons and should thus be avoided.