How do I add a notification for process completions

Question

How can I add a notification of some sort (like playing a .wav file or creating a pop-up on the status bar) when a process finishes.

For example, I am compiling a program that takes a couple of hours to finish. I would like to hear/see some sort of message when it completes compiling. Is there a tool for doing this (like tying an alarm program to the pid of a process) or something like that?

Answer 1

One way to get a popup (a desktop notification) is to install the libnotify-bin package, then add "alert" to your command line, like this:

./configure && make && alert

Note that "alert" is a convenience alias, if you type:

alias alert

you will see that behind the scenes it calls the notify-send command, which has a bunch of interesting options, so you may want to define your own alias to call notify-send in a way that better suits you.