Announcing the completion of a long terminal job

So, here I am compiling out test .tex files. These days, the manual is around 120,000 words and takes quite a bit of time to compile all the way to a .tex file. Given the chance for error in between clicking Compile and that file, I’m working in stages. I export a regular .md file from Scrivener, and then use the command line to invoke MMD manually. This way I can correct small errors in the .md file and try again, without having to recompile the .md file. Being an old Linux geek, for long jobs like this, I would append the “beep” command to whatever command I’d issued in the xterm session, so I could go off and do something else while the computer worked. The only problem is, Mac OS X doesn’t come installed with the venerable beep, probably because it doesn’t have a system beep like most PCs do. So I did a little Googling, and discovered an amusing remedy. You can make the Mac talk from the command line with the say command, and feeding it a string. So I tried this:

mmd2LaTeX.pl manual.md > manual.tex; say "All system nominal"

Lovely. Hopefully someone will find that useful, if they in the final phases and waiting several minutes for a .tex file. :slight_smile:

I suddenly feel special! Say is a regular part of all my scripts. Lets everyone near me at work experience that gut wrenching feeling of systems insufficiency. I prefer to prefix everything with “Master Jaysen,”. Really rubs it in.

For those of you looking for a really lightweight way to have files read to you, do

say -f file

Make sure file is plain text though. RTF is ugly using the command line.

say -f /dev/random

Or you could just PM vic-k.