[GRASS-dev] preexec()/precmd() possibilities

[William Kyngesburye]

This complex shell programming is a bit much for me, but I found this  
interesting hack for bash that looks useful.

http://glyf.livejournal.com/63106.html

Summary - zsh has a feature called preexec() to intercept the start  
of any shell command.  This 'glyf' person worked out a way to get  
that feature in bash (I don't know if it could work in other shells).


The reference I found, that I thought would be nice in GRASS, is to  
use that feature to track a command and fire off a system  
notification event when it finishes (in the OSX case, with the Growl  
notification tool), including the elapsed time.  Nice for those long- 
running GRASS commands.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071009124425468

The hint as it is set up only works at the top level of the bash  
shell, so it doesn't work inside the GRASS shell.  It would have to  
be added to init.sh.  There is currently no author/license info in  
the preexec script, so we'd have to ask about that.

There's Growl (3rd-party extension) on OSX.  To be useful on other  
platforms, some system notification mechanism would be needed.   
Possibly make it configurable, if there are multiple choices of  
notification extensions.  And definitely make it optional.


I'll see if I can get the OSX/Growl preexec working, but I wonder if  
there is already a similar feature in init.sh that could be used?

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

"This is a question about the past, is it? ... How can I tell that  
the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy  
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- The Ruler of the Universe