I realized that the say command can be great when combined with another command/program because it can read you the output. I tried to pipe the output from leave to say by typing the following in terminal, but it didn't work.
leave +5 | say
What is the correct way to do this?
Based on mankoff's answer, this works:
leave +1 2>&1 | while read line ; do echo $line | say ; done
although leave no longer vanishes into the background and lets you carry on typing. Similarly:
leave +1 2>&1 | while read line ; do echo $line | say ; done &
will make it vanish into the background, but will also speak a (harmless) process ID number as well. So neither is quite perfect, but both work.
(I was looking for a solution to:
ping google.com | say
which suffers a similar problem, and someone suggested the above as a solution. I didn't add this as a comment to mankoff's answer because I can't work out how to put spaces and newlines in comments.).
|say like |grep -v ^[0-9]*$, etc.
read line reads each line of an input and then you just echo the line so you can pipe it to say?
while ... do form makes sure it does the read line/say line pair over and over. (The problem is that when you pipe input into say, it waits until the entire end of the input before speaking all of it at once, however read takes one line and stops. So the code chops a continuous output into line-sized chunks and launches say once for each chunk).
Commented
Mar 12, 2011 at 2:06
Your example is, in general, the correct way to pipe normal output to say:
cat file | say
echo "hello world" | say
The specific issue is that the | (pipe) character transfers STDOUT from the command on the left to STDIN to the command on the right. say then speaks whatever is on STDIN.
However, leave does not print the output directly to STDOUT. It is either using STDERR, or some other message mechanism. You can pipe STDERR through the |, but the syntax is shell dependent. For bash, you would do it like so, although I'm not sure that this will make leave work with say, as I don't much about leave.
cmd 2>&1 |cmd2
STDERR or some other message mechanism? Why would it do that. Another commenter seems to think the issue is that leave is a daemon. What is that last command you wrote? cmd 2>&1 |cmd2
leave do that (whatever "that" is)? Because the authors wrote it that way.
STDERR from leave to say and it almost worked. Basically, all of the output was sent at one time rather than in increments.
As an addition to this - if you want to pipe an ongoing file to say, the "recipe" also works with tail:
tail -f ~/Documents/activity.log | while read line ; do echo $line | say ; done
I think you simply can´t use leave for that, rather use sleep with the correct amount of seconds (put it into a short script to convert seconds to minutes, hours):
sleep 60 && say -v Vicki 'Time to leave!' &
say. Thanks for the response though.
leaveforks/daemonizes and leaves your shell.|