achinoam01: Unix mail notifications via Growl

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Unix mail notifications via Growl

This tip lets you get a notification through Growl whenever new Unix mail arrives, with the subject of the mail. I get Unix mail as a result of run cron-jobs. I use cron because whether you have lingon or not; it is far easier to schedule a job with cron.

When there is something that I really want to watch from a process run by cron I do:

echo "the very interesting stuff" |mail -s "IMPORTANT" myusername

or some other Unix command to send the same mail message.

The problem is that I have to manually go into Unix mail and manually check if there is any new mail or not, and sometimes I just forget to do that.

Therefor I have made a notification in Growl via a launchd job and an AppleScript.

Prerequisites: You need to have installed Growl and Growl helper.

The lanchd process checks if your /var/mail/You mail file has changed, and if it has, the launchd process will run the ...