I found a sort-of solution. dunno if this works.

I like Jay's idea, and that makes sense. (most of these ideas can be used together).

For what I need (running a shell script locally, no screen or ssh, in gnome-terminal) this works:

$ echo "\E[?5h"

$ echo "\E[?5l"

great big annoying flashing (for me).

~Alex

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Jay Goel < jpgoel@ncsu.[redacted] > wrote:

This won't (doesn't, in fact) work as expected. inversescreen only works in a virtual terminal, which it also says in the manpage. You could try doing this with ncurses; that is, wrap your bash script into a python or c program which uses the ncurses api to flash the terminal.

You could also have your program pop up a window of some sort - maybe using "zenity". This might do the trick. It flashes an icon in the notification area. When you click on that icon, then it stops flashing.

#! /bin/bash

RC=5
TIMEOUT=3

while [ $RC -gt 0 ]
do
zenity --notification --text "Hello world" --timeout=$TIMEOUT
RC=$?
sleep $TIMEOUT
done

Good luck!

Jay

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Stephen Bryant < stephen@stephenbryant.[redacted] > wrote:

If you run it in screen, you can switch between visual bell and audio bell with C-a C-g. This will only flash it once though. If you want it to keep flashing, you might could write a script something like:

while (1)
{
setterm -inversescreen on
sleep(500)
setterm -inversescreen off
sleep(1000)
}


And then run your script as ./myscript.sh && ./flashterm.sh. I haven't tried this, but I'd think it should work in theory.

--
Stephen Bryant

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Alexander Ray < alexjray.ncsu@gmail.[redacted] > wrote:

hey guys!

Yet another im-heavily-customizing-hacking-my-environment style question:

I'm working on automation scripts to make my life easier (read: hacker, lulz) and one of the things I'd like to do is have a script running in a terminal in the corner of my screen get my attention when its done.

This means:

Flashing the terminal (a 'visual bell')

Flashing the bar on my panel (for example, when you have the firefox download mini-window open, but minimized, and a download finished, this starts flashing)

What i'm avoiding:

Audio bell. its just annoying. i <3 my music :-)

Thoughts?Ponders?Quandries?Good Jokes?Bad Jokes?

thanks,

~Alex