Any advantages to this over scp, samba/nfs, or even something like LocalSend?

I know you’re looking for a desktop solution, but here’s something that you can try in case you can’t find one – I’m betting that having a solution is better than having none!

So I just had a quick muck around:

• You can use pgrep to detect if a process with a given name is running
• You can write to /dev/pts/0 to trigger a desktop notification
• You can drop it into a cron job to run it automatically on a schedule

As a test, the following command will look for a process called syncthing and send a desktop notification if it can’t find it:

pgrep syncthing || echo "Syncthing is not running > /dev/pts/0"

To set up a cron job:

1. open a terminal
2. open the editor with crontab -e (if you need to pick an editor, nano will probably be your best bet, it’s easiest to use)
3. in the editor, add the following line to the end of the file: 0 * * * * pgrep syncthing || echo "Syncthing is not running" > /dev/pts/0
   • The 0 * * * * sets up the schedule (on the 0th minute of every hour, every day of the month, every month, on every day of the week)
   • Everything after that is the command to run
4. save and quit

If you ever want to get rid of it, just open the cron file again (crontab -e) and remove the line.

I gave this a go on KDE under Wayland and it seems to do the trick. Good luck, I hope you find what you’re looking for!

[edit-1] added step (2) to install libnotify-bin in case you don’t have it already. [edit-2] added XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to step (4) [edit-3] removed references to libnotify, replace with /dev/pts/0 (Nice one, @sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works !)

Hello! I don’t know of a desktop watchdog application that will do this for you, but you may be able to achieve this with a simple cron job. Probably just an hourly crontab entry that looks for a running process with the right name, and uses something like notify-send to send an alert if it’s not found. I’ll jump on the computer and have a quick play, though I run gnome not plasma so I don’t know how well it will translate.

I’m sure there are ways to suppress output from stdin presenting in the terminal but I couldn’t tell you how to do it without looking it up myself.

The easiest entry point to this problem that I can think of off the top of my head is password input masking (e.g., when you run sudo and type your password, it prevents character output even though the characters are read by the application).

There is almost certainly a much better and more appropriate mechanism to prevent stdin characters from printing directly to the terminal (perhaps some kind of special character? A TTY control option?) but I don’t know it off-hand.

In general allowing content to be supplied on stdin is desirable behavior, because it allows a developer to (for example) write applications that work as pipes that can have content queued on the input stream ready for processing.

If that behaviour doesn’t suit your use case and you need to only accept input after a certain point, you could read() and simply ignore/discard the current content of stdin before you write your question/accept the answer from the user.

Yep, hence the preface. Just offering up an alternative to using software they’re concerned about in case they don’t know they have the option. 🙂

I’m going to assume that by the way you’re describing it, using an excel alternative is totally out of the question or simply not possible, but just in case it isn’t…

If you haven’t heard of it, check out LibreOffice.