I use the mutt email client for all of my email accounts
(in combination with mbsync for offline mail). One of the things I’ve hear
quite a few people complain about is its lack of notification integration, be
it through libnotify, system sounds, or any other means. Rightefully so, it is
a bit annoying to have to keep checking your terminal for new mail. With that,
I wrote a simple script to remedy the issue.
This script uses the inotify-tools to watch the given directory for new files
without having to loop and execute commands every x seconds, consuming many
system resources. Inotify is very small and will not bog down your machine (it
uses the linux kernel inotify subsystem to sleep until triggered by the
specified filesystem event).
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Command to be executed when a change occurs
cmd='mplayer -really-quiet ~/.sounds/notify.ogg'
# Require user to specify directory to be watched
if [[ -z ${1} ]]; then
echo "Please specify a directory to be monitored."
exit 1
fi
monpath=${1}
# Verify directory to be monitored exists
if [[ ! -d ${monpath} ]]; then
echo "Path ${monpath} does not exist. Please check the path and try again."
exit 1
fi
echo "Monitoring ${monpath}"
while [ 0==0 ]; do
# Wait for a file creation operation
inotifywait -e create -r "${monpath}"
# Display with really quiet because mplayer is chatty
${cmd}
done
