pynotify - CLI tool for Gnome libnotify
On my Mac, I use Growl all the time. Especially using the CLI tool growlnotify to notify me from my scripts. Recent versions of Gnome use libnotify to display notifications similarly to Growl.
I couldn’t find a CLI tool, so I wrote one. The Python API is very handy and easy to understand, but hardly documented at all. Thanks to these people for giving me a jump start.
I tried to make the parameters similar to that of growlnotify… Mostly out of laziness.
Anyway… Here it is. pynotify
Posted: June 22nd, 2007.
Tags: Linux/BSD
Comments
Comment from fungus
Time September 13, 2007 at 7:34 pm
init() is a function call inside the pynotify library.
from pynotify import *
says to import everything in the module into the current namespace. If the import of pynotify didn’t fail, then there is a problem with the module itself.
Perhaps an incompatible version… I am not sure exactly.
Comment from Stefan
Time September 13, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Forgive my ignorance of Python on this one.
“from pynotify import *”
This imports everything in the current script into the current namespace? (I only ask because I’ve seen pynotify and python-notify used interchangably, does this refer to your pynotify or the python-notify bindings?). Granted, it wouldn’t make much sense to have a file import its own header, but I don’t know Python. Maybe it’s funky.
If init() refers to a function defined inside *your* pynotify code, then the problem seems to be that init() is not defined anywhere in the file you provided. The only functions I see are send_notification(), usage(), and main().
If init() is coming from python-notify, then I can think of two possible issues. One is that I have an incompatible version (praytell what version you built this on?)
The second is that I have your script located in a place where it cannot find the pynotify library. Must your script be located in a specific places in the file system in order to function?
Thanks,
-Stefan
Comment from Stefan
Time September 13, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Update: I changed the line “from pynotify import *” to “from pynotify import init” and the import immediately fails.
That seems like it could be a problem.
Comment from Oshu
Time September 25, 2007 at 9:34 am
Stefan, I use it like this:
import pynotify
pynotify.init(”my program”)
n = pynotify.Notification(”Title”, “body”, “gtk.STOCK_INFO”)
n.set_urgency(pynotify.URGENCY_NORMAL)
n.set_timeout(pynotify.EXPIRES_NEVER)
n.show()
Comment from chess board
Time February 24, 2009 at 6:17 am
Using the CLI tool growl notify to notify me from my scripts. Recent versions of Gnome use lib notify to display notifications similarly to Growl.A PI is very handy and easy to understand, but hardly documented at all.so thanks for informative blog.really interesting i want to use this and i will try so i appreciate to your efforts.
Comment from Marius Scurtescu
Time February 26, 2009 at 11:50 pm
On debian based system there is a similar command line tool called notify-send, it is in the libnotify-bin package.
Comment from Stefan
Time September 13, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Hey there,
I like the idea of this tool a lot, but I’m having a (probably stupid) issue. I’m not familiar with python, but it seems that the call to init() in send_notification(config) doesn’t point anywhere.
Consequently, the script is failing with the following stack trace:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/pynotify”, line 72, in
main()
File “/usr/bin/pynotify”, line 66, in main
send_notification(config)
File “/usr/bin/pynotify”, line 7, in send_notification
init(config['appName'])
NameError: global name ‘init’ is not defined
Am I missing something, or was this an omission from the code?