joseti.me

As part of my work I often have to run time-intensive jobs, both locally and remotely. In order to not have to actively check on them before they finish I have written a small utility in Bash to observe select tasks and send me a message upon their completion.

This utility is based on Telegram-Alert by Omar Richardson and it requires the following two prerequisites:

• internet access for curl or wget
• telegram-alert to be executable

Setting up Telegram-Alert

First download and set up the telegram-alert system according to the steps outlined in the readme. Place the telegram-alert executable in an appropriate location in your $PATH and try sending a couple messages from a new shell instance.

Creating the observer tool

Create a new executable file named tgo in with the following content:

#!/bin/bash

### __author__ = "joseti.me/about" 
### __version__ = "1.0.1"
### __license__ = "GPLv3"

###
### very basic shell utility script to observe a process using telegram-alert
### requires 'telegram-alert' to be successfully set up on system working
### command syntax: tgo <command [arguments]>
###

# run all parameters as-is in bash, first parameter assumed to be valid executable
"$@"

# have telegram-alert send a message with executed command, parameters and exit code
telegram-alert "Command '$@' finished with exit code $?"

Place the tgo executable in an appropriate location, preferrably the same location as telegram-alert and reload your shell.

Using the observer tool

Observing a process is now simple, just prepend tgo in front of the call to be observed, similar to how nohup is used.

• tgo true
• tgo false
• echo "Testing 1" && tgo echo "Testing 2" && echo "Testing 3"

You will now get a Telegram message from your bot as soon as the observed process has exited.