getting alerts about system upgrades
Karl Vogel
vogelke at pobox.com
Thu Jun 1 10:43:47 PDT 2006
>> On Thu, 1 Jun 2006 12:54:24 +1200 (NZST),
>> Andrew McNaughton <andrew at scoop.co.nz> said:
A> I do that, but my mailbox gets lots of traffic. Sometimes I miss
A> something, and as far as I know, there's no system to keep reminding me,
A> nor a way to quickly check the current state of play.
I have the same problem, so I run the script below hourly from cron to
check my mailbox for anything I consider urgent. It won't nag me
repeatedly about the same messages, so it's not too intrusive.
The file "$HOME/.whitelist-alert" holds patterns (one per line) for
messages that should get immediate attention. The patterns are mostly
email addresses or words consistently found in subject lines.
The "xnote" program is simply a driver for "xalarm", which displays an
X-windows popup message.
--
Karl Vogel I don't speak for the USAF or my company
vogelke at pobox dot com http://www.pobox.com/~vogelke
The early bird still has to eat worms.
===========================================================================
#!/bin/sh
# look for important messages.
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
export PATH
umask 077
# Any mail?
mbox="/var/mail/$USER"
if test -s "$mbox"
then
old="$HOME/.priority"
new="$HOME/.priority.n"
fgrep -if $HOME/.whitelist-alert $mbox > $new
# don't say anything unless we have new priority mail.
if test -s "$new"
then
cmp -s $old $new || xnote "you have high-priority mail"
fi
mv $new $old
fi
exit 0
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