bash_alarm_clock

A fully featured bash alarm clock leveraging cron

Contents

1. About
2. License
3. Prerequisites
4. Configuration
5. Usage
6. TODO

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1. About

This is a program greatly indebted to various cron alarm clocks like this one, though it has some features that those simple ones don't have.

The briefing.sh script is described on my blog how to get a daily briefing.

2. License

This project is licensed under the MIT license. For the full license, see LICENSE.

3. Prerequisites

These may already be installed on your system.

• kill can be found on major Linux distributions.
• pkill can be found on major Linux distributions.
• date can be found on major Linux distributions.
• sed can be found on major Linux distributions.
• ls can be found on major Linux distributions.
• cronic to reduce cron's email output, found here

Useful tools to use with this alarm clock.

• mplayer command-line tool for playing media. mplayer can be found on major Linux distributions.
• podfox command-line tool for podcasts, found here
• gnome-schedule if you aren't comfy with crontab -e, found here

4. Configuration

Configuration file

Edit the RC file and put it in $HOME/.config/bash_alarm to put your alarms there in the format:

24 HOUR TIME;DAY OF WEEK[UMTWRFS];ALARM GROUP;[COMMAND]

e.g.

0530;MTWRF;music;/usr/bin/mplayer -noconsolecontrols -ao pulse -volume 100 -really-quiet -loop 5 "~/alarm.mp3" &

Would use mplayer to play an alarm at 5:30 AM every weekday, and

1400;US;music;/usr/bin/mplayer -noconsolecontrols -ao pulse -volume 100 -really-quiet -loop 5 "~/wave_sounds.mp3" &

would use mplayer to play a different wave-crashing sound at 2:00 PM on Sunday and Saturday.

The semicolon is the dividing mark; your command should NOT have a semicolon in it. Right now, that means calling something like briefing.sh a minute or two before the playing command.

Crontab change

Edit your crontab using either crontab -e or a tool like gnome-schedule to call the script once a minute with the -c command line variable, e.g.

* * * * * * /usr/bin/cronic /PATH/TO/bash_alarm.sh -c

Notes about setting up alarms

I added export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR="/run/user/1000" to the alarm script to solve a problem raised and solved here about running audio apps from cron.

If you have problems with mplayer not playing, try using -noconsolecontrols as an argument.

5. Usage

• Running a check

Run bash_alarm.sh -c, either from cron or the commandline.

Both of these commands are intentionally slightly cumbersome, because this is being used as an alarm clock...

• Stopping alarms

Run bash_alarm.sh -k [all|group name]. If you specify all, you do not need to specify any other group name. Otherwise, it will only kill alarms that are part of the named group.

• Snoozing alarms

Run bash_alarm.sh -s [all|group name] [snooze time in minutes]. If you specify all, you do not need to specify any other group name. Otherwise, it will only snooze alarms that are part of the named group. The snooze time should only be a whole number. If no number is specified, the snooze time is set to 5.

6. Todo

• Way to non-manually add single-time alarms
• How to skip alarm for next day
• GUI (or at least non-programatically editing) interface