Undistract-me – Alerts you when long-running commands finally complete
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From Developer
Some commands take ages to run
You're doing some work, and as part of that you need to run a command on the terminal that takes a little while to finish. Perhaps it's your test suite, your build process, or an unusually big data run.
Watching commands is boring
You run the command, watch it for maybe a second and then switch to doing something else—answering email or something more useful and fun than staring at a terminal.
Time flies when you're distracted
You get so deeply involved in your email that twenty minutes fly by. When you switch back to your terminal the command has finished, but you've got no idea whether it was nineteen seconds ago or nineteen minutes ago.
Install Undistract-me in ubuntu
Open the terminal and run the following commands
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:undistract-me-packagers/daily
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install undistract-me
Task Spooler http://freecode.com/projects/taskspooler is another way to handle long running processes.
It places any task into a queue that you control. All stderr/stdout output is placed into a log file that you can watch or review later. Suppost you have 20 long running tasks, but only want 2 running at a time, TS, is perfect. Come back later and you can see which completed, which are active and which are still in the queue.
For example, PBS had a 4-part series on The Space Age last night that I recorded to 1080i mpeg. Need to transcode those to 720p h.264 – which will take more than a few hours. TS is perfect for this while the box is doing 20 other things too.