How to write to KDE's OSD or notification from console?

How can I write, from a bash script, to KDE's OSD or notification area? I am using KDE 4.5, and basically what I want is my script to report some stuff when it is run. Since I run the script by a shortcut, I have no console output, but I would like to write to OSD on notification area.

I know about, and use, "osd_cat" but that just puts some ugly text on the screen.

Thanks.

Patkos Csaba

Posted 2010-08-11T21:38:13.320

Reputation: 1 542

Usually, the answer to "How … kde4 … from the shell" starts with qdbus. I would expect something like qdbus org.kde.knotify /Notify event "notice" "my script" '(' ')' "title" "body" 0 '(' ')' 1000 0 to work, but it produces no visible effect on my Ubuntu 10.04 kde 4.4.2. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' – 2010-08-12T09:13:04.200

By the way, this is what passes for the API documentation: http://api.kde.org/4.x-api/kdebase-runtime-apidocs/knotify/html/classKNotify.html

– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' – 2010-08-12T09:15:40.823

Answers

notify-send 'why hello there'

notify-send is part of the package libnotify-tools.

perl -MDesktop::Notify -e'Desktop::Notify->new->create(body => q{why hello there})->show'

Desktop::Notify is available on CPAN.

daxim

Posted 2010-08-11T21:38:13.320

Reputation: 1 072

unfortunately, it's no longer a part of libnotify4 :-/ kdialog below still works. This is not a fault of daxim, just KDE's shifting libraries... – mike – 2014-02-11T12:26:39.190

As an alternative:

kdialog --passivepopup 'why hello there' 5

5 is the number of seconds it will last.
Run kdialog --help for other options, like title.

Malabarba

Posted 2010-08-11T21:38:13.320

Reputation: 7 588

1Don't even need to install any additional packages, and has all the options you would need, great! :-) – timss – 2014-03-09T20:26:35.713