howto

If you are running Ubuntu on your desktop, you certainly have seen the ephemeral balloons that pop-up with notifications. These are designed to make you aware of something, e.g. that you have email, without interrupting your work with a window that you must close.

These balloons, also called bubbles, are shown by a notification daemon, that receives messages from other programs, queue them and presents them in a overlay for a short period of time. On Ubuntu (from 9.04) the notification daemon is called Notify OSD.

Many GUI programs use this desktop notification service to provide unobtrusive information about progress, events and such things. Wouldn't it be nice if you could send such messages from your own Bash scripts? Well, you can with notify-send.

One of the eldest Unix utilities is the stream editor Sed. It was born 1973, and is still going strong. If you haven't yet made its acquaintance, I highly recommend that you read Bruce Barnett's Sed -- An Introduction and Tutorial. I use the GNU version of Sed almost everyday.

There is just one problem with Sed. It sometimes get confused by character encoding, in particular UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1