Are we there yet… Get notified when processes end with PWATCH

I four-finger swipe my touchpad… a mostly black terminal slides into my field of view and before the screen snaps in place I can plainly see that my bzip2 remains working with no bar showing progress. Yes, I could have piped my process through pv for a progress bar, and/or added a && say "Finally Finished", but alas, I did not and with upwards of 10 minutes already sunk into zipping I wasn’t going to ^C it now!

What I really need is a notification when my process is complete, so I don’t need to swipe over every 2 minutes. I quickly search for any cli tool to throw a notification when an existing process dies, but to no avail. How hard could it be to poll ps PID of my process and throw a mac notification when it’s done? I four-finger swipe again back to an unchanged terminal screen bzip2ing. Thats it! I’ll make it myself!

And now it begins…

I switch tabs to a fresh terminal screen.

$ cd ~
$ mkdir pnotify
# wait... let me check if that name exists...
$ curl -sI https://www.npmjs.com/package/pnotify | grep HTTP
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
# hmm.. how about 
$ curl -Is https://www.npmjs.com/package/pwatch | grep HTTP
  HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
$ mv pnotify pwatch
$ cd pwatch
$ npm init -y
$ git init
$ vim .

A bit of code later and I’ve got a v0.0.1 complete!

npm publish
npm install -g pwatch

Now, pwatch PID will call a function that runs ps PID , if it sees the process is running, then it runs the main function again after 1 second, otherwise it will send a native notification through node-notifier.

Great now let me just ps aux | grep bzip to find the PID of the file being zipped… Nothing?! I switch my tabs back to see that my file has finally finished zipping! 😫 😐

Okay… well, now I’ve got another opportunity to try it out for my scp file.bzip server:~ this will surely take a while. Hmm but wouldn’t it be easier if I can just scp file.bzip server:~ | pwatch since I know this will take a while? Switching back to my pwatch directory, I add some code to handle reading stdin and viola a v0.0.2 is born!

Now I scp largefile.zip server:~ | pwatch check my email and HackerNews and several minutes later I get a native notification alerting me my process is complete!

Native Notification on MacOS (but also works on Linux / Windows 😌)

Now it ends…

Over the next weekend I make a few more adjustments. With some feedback and support from friends Mirza Joldic and Tom Goldenberg I decide on a couple of things.

1. Add a pwatch search NAME command to find running processes.
2. Add a pwatch help to display documentation for everything
3. Have pwatch PID run in background by default. (before 0.0.6 it would hang the terminal)

Now if you want native notifications when your processes end:

npm install -g pwatch

And see the full list of commands it offers with pwatch help

If you have any suggestions, issues, or requests related to pwatch I would absolutely love to hear about them! Either here, twitter, or as a GitHub issue: jkrup/pwatch and while you’re there feel free to leave a ⭐️ … :)