Notify-OSD – How to Use ‘notify-send’ to Immediately Replace an Existing Notification

bashcommand linenotificationnotify-osd

When I use notify-send to show a notification on the desktop, and then use it again to show a different notification, I have noticed that the second one only shows after the first one has disappeared.

Is there a way to get notify-send to immediately replace an existing notification with a different one?

Best Answer

You can, but you must use a patched libnotify to do so

notify-send does not have the capability to replace existing notifications before they have timed out (or disappeared). This is a known bug. However, a commenter on the bug report has posted a patch to fix it.

Installing the patched libnotify-bin from PPA

I have created a patched version of the libnotify-bin package which allows replacements in my PPA. Currently it's for Ubuntu 12.04 only, but if you need it for any other currently supported release, please post a comment and I will try my best to make it available.

To install, open a terminal and:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:izx/askubuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

How to use the replacement capabilities

The patched notify-send includes two new switches, -p (or --print-id ), and -r (or --replace-id ). The --help describes them as:

  -p, --print-id                    Print the notification ID.
  -r, --replace-id=REPLACE_ID       The ID of the notification to replace.

With -p, each notify-send will return an ID N (number/integer).
Issuing another notify-send with -r N will replace the previous notification immediately.
For example, for bash, you can save the ID from notify-send -p ... with:
```
NID=$(notify-send -p "MESSAGE-1")
```
and then replace it with:
```
notify-send -r $NID "MESSAGE-2"
```
You can recursively use both -p and -r in a script, as long as the -r variable is initialized to 0 at the beginning.

Here's a simple script that shows notifications counting from 0 to 100 at half-second intervals:

#!/bin/bash

NID=0

for i in {0..100..10}
    do
          NID=$(notify-send -p -r $NID $i)
          sleep 0.5
    done

Related Solutions

ssh – How to Send Notify OSD Message to Remote User via SSH

Have you tried

ssh user@host 'DISPLAY=:0 notify-send "TEST MESSAGE."'

Answer taken from ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1240828 (without the -X option as suggested by jjmontes)

Ubuntu – How to force a new Notification in notify-osd to show up without waiting for the earlier one to exit

There is a patch for this bug at - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libnotify/+bug/257135?comments=all

@izx has made a ppa version for the patch so installation is now easy (thank you izx!)- How do I use 'notify-send' to immediately replace an existing notification?

To install, open a terminal and:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:izx/askubuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

Now you should have installed a patched version of notify-send that can now replace and print id numbers, so you can use just one notification box for your shell script. The program now has -p and -r options, or the long syntax being --print-id and --replace-id

I wrote up a script based on your original that will make use of this, the starting and stopping notifications display until the stopped and started display, and it reuses the same notification box, if you have installed the patched version, make an file called config.txt and put the number 0 inside, then put that file in the same folder as your lampp.sh file.

#!/bin/sh

SERVICE='proftpd'

if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $SERVICE > /dev/null

then
notify-send -t 0 -p -r `cat config.txt` -i /opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-small.gif "Stopping XAMPP ..." >config.txt && gksudo /opt/lampp/lampp stop && notify-send -r `cat config.txt` -t 5000 -i /opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-small.gif "XAMPP Stoped."  
else
notify-send -t 0 -p -r `cat config.txt` -i /opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-small.gif "Starting XAMPP ..." >config.txt && gksudo /opt/lampp/lampp start && notify-send -r `cat config.txt` -t 5000 -i /opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-small.gif "XAMPP Started."

fi

Edit This is how it shows on mine... enter image description here