The problem was this: My computer would do some heavy lifting (like importing a couple M records into a MySQL database), and I would sit over at another desk (with BastianQ) doing something else.
Now, I got tired of walking over to my machine every five minutes to see if it was done yet. So I wasted a few minutes trying to figure out how to make the Mac beep after it’s finished its command line job, but neither beep nor alert nor sound nor anything else I could think of worked, so I gave up.
A much neater solution came along today, through this Mac Geekery post:
wc -l imdb.nt ; say "ok, what's next?"
The first part is the long-running command. The second part is just coolness.
Apple has announced that the next version of OS X will have much improved speech synthesis. That’s too bad, I dig this weird female robot voice. (In case your computer can play .aiff files: ok.aiff)
(In related geekness, I spent a tenth of a second wondering if say "ok, what's next?" > ok.aiff would work. It should! Turns out not even Unix is perfect.)
It turns out that unix is perfect: the > symbol just redirects standard output from the terminal to a file. So it should make an empty file.
If you want to send the output an aiff file use:
say “plugh” -o plugh.aiff
you can see this an more with
man say
Oops that should have been:
say -o plugh.aiff “plugh”
Thanks! I’m trying to use this to run meetings:
say “Hello, and welcome to the meeting. We begin with announcements. 10 minutes. Begin”
sleep 540
say “9 minutes have passed”
sleep 60
say “ok, Time up”
say “What’s next?”
say “Items we will discuss for 5 minutes. Ready?”
say “Item 1: Widget output. Yes, I can even read the agenda items to us. If I do that, it could help keep us on track…”