Need menu bar app to show output of Terminal command every 60s

menu bar

I need a menu-bar app* which will show me the output of a terminal command, and run that Terminal command every 60s or so.

Or I need a menu-bar app which will read the contents of a file, and update whenever that file is updated.

(The output would be no more than 3 or 4 digits)

Are there any such apps?

* neither the Dock nor the Desktop are workable alternatives. Needs to be the menu bar.

Update 2014-06-16: The answer from Jun 9 '12 at 2:15 did not end up working for me after all, so I'm still looking for a solution.

2020-04-04

I forgot all about having asked this question. For the past several years I have been using TextBar which is the perfect solution that I had always been looking for.

Best Answer

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "osx/cocoa"
include OSX

app = NSApplication.sharedApplication 
statusitem = NSStatusBar.systemStatusBar().statusItemWithLength(NSVariableStatusItemLength)
while true
    statusitem.setTitle(rand(999))
    sleep 1
end
app.run

(If anyone who actually knows Cocoa wants to improve this, feel free to edit.) I more or less just copied the script from taw's blog: Personal experience points and OSX menulets, which was mentioned in display - Is there a way to have AppleScript output displayed in the menubar? - Apple.

Related Solutions

Reload menu bar from terminal (not SystemUIServer)

So I finally found a solution to this.

I compiled the following Objective-c code and call it through the terminal.

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

int main(int argc, const char * argv[])
{

  @autoreleasepool {
    LSSharedFileListRef recentDocsList = LSSharedFileListCreate(NULL, kLSSharedFileListRecentDocumentItems, NULL);
    LSSharedFileListRemoveAllItems(recentDocsList);
    NSLog(@"Cleared files!");
  }
   return 0;
}

Scriptable menu bar icons

I would suggest starting with this thread, which describes using Cocoa Objective-C calls from within AppleScript. There is an example Xcode project here.

And Launch is a complete application written in AppleScript that functionally does this. Its Xcode project file is here.

The basic premise is to generate NSMenuItem instances and add them to the system's NSStatusBar:

set statusMenu to (NSMenu's alloc)'s initWithTitle_("Launch")
-- (build and do stuff with the statusMenu here)
set sysStatusBar to NSStatusBar's systemStatusBar
set statusItem to sysStatusBar's statusItemWithLength_(32)
tell statusItem to setMenu_(statusMenu)
tell statusItem to setHighlightMode_(1)
set menuImage to NSImage's imageNamed_("icon.png")
tell statusItem to setImage_(menuImage)

2020-04-04

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Reload menu bar from terminal (not SystemUIServer)

Scriptable menu bar icons

Related Question