growlnotify

A shell script 'wrapper' for the actual growlnotify command.

Requirements

the actual growlnotify binary which is assumed to be installed at /usr/local/bin/growlnotify.
Mountain Lion - because it uses pgrep and the one from brew isn't compatible with the one Apple included in 10.8. (Although this could easily be worked around, I'm only using 10.8 these days.)
Growl.app. Obviously.

Purpose

This script is intended to be placed in your $PATH before /usr/local/bin/ so that this script will be called whenever you refer to growlnotify. This script will call the actual growlnotify but will do several other things as well.

It will check to make sure that growlnotify is actually installed at /usr/local/bin and if it isn't, it will download and install it for you.
It will check to make sure that Growl.app is installed, and if it isn't, it will open the Mac App Store.app to the Growl.app page and wait for you to install it.
If Growl.app is installed and growlnotify is installed, it will check to make sure that Growl.app is running, and if it isn't, it will launch it. Don't want to auto-launch Growl when you log in to your Mac? No problem. Now it will start when needed (at least for your shell scripts).
Last but not least, this script will check to make sure that the growlnotify binary exits properly, and if it doesn't, it will kill Growl.app, restart it, and tries to send the growlnotify message again (because if growlnotify doesn't exit properly, it usually means that Growl.app is not responding properly). It will try 5 times, if it doesn't work after 5 times, it just gives up.

Usage

Simply download and install this script as growlnotify somewhere other than /usr/local/bin/ and make sure that it occurs before /usr/local/bin/ in your $PATH.

You could rename the actual growlnotify to something like growlnotify.orig and then install this to /usr/local/bin/growlnotify and then just change this line in the script:

GN='/usr/local/bin/growlnotify'

GN='/usr/local/bin/growlnotify.orig'

but that is not recommended because if you ever run this on a Mac which doesn't have the actual growlnotify installed, the installer will overwrite this script.

"Why not just use Mountain Lion's notifications?"

Because they suck. Growl is 100% better than Mountain Lion's notifications. They're more customizable, they're able to show longer messages, and more apps support it.

Minor Bug / Limitation

I don't usually send growlnotify messages via stdin, but it can be done. My script supports that, to a limited degree. If there are no arguments to growlnotify then it is assumed that the user intended to send a message to growlnotify via stdin, and so it will be passed on that way. However, the actual growlnotify also lets you do things like this:

	echo "hello world" | growlnotify -a TextEdit -d HelloWorld -t "The Title Here"

where only the message is sent via stdin and the rest of the arguments are set as usual. My script doesn't support that because I don't want to get into parsing all the args to see if there's an -m or --message among them, because I never use growlnotify that way.

License

growlnotify by TJ Luoma is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://growl.info/downloads. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rhymeswithdiploma.com/contact/.

tjluoma / growlnotify