Comments on: pynotify – CLI tool for Gnome libnotify

By: Marius Scurtescu

Marius Scurtescu — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 05:50:51 +0000

On debian based system there is a similar command line tool called notify-send, it is in the libnotify-bin package.

By: chess board

chess board — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:17:47 +0000

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.

By: Jim Russell

Jim Russell — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 04:42:48 +0000

I had the “init” failure as well, and I now know why. When you save Lonnie’s script, don’t call it pynotify or pynotify.py. Call it pynot.py or something else. You see, the library being used is called pynotify, and if you have a pynotify.py in your current directory, the import will look there instead of your site packages to try to find the init method.

By: AmÃ©rico Dias

AmÃ©rico Dias — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 03:04:54 +0000

I have this problem too!

By: Oshu

Oshu — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:34:50 +0000

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()

By: Stefan

Stefan — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:09:58 +0000

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.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:07:17 +0000

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

By: fungus

fungus — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:34:14 +0000

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.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:28:38 +0000

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?