using curl to trigger a notification over http e.g. when a long running task has completed?

Question

Today I left work with a long running task running in the shell. For the sake of argument let's say I'm using 'wc -l' to count lines in a huge file. I'd like to get a notification when it is done, but I can't rely on email. I want to use curl to trigger an event on some online notification service, which I can then check for from home.

wc -l some_huge_file; curl http://some-notification-service.com

Are there any notification services out there that I could use with curl? I imagine that issuing a GET request to some resource, sets a flag that the job has completed, send an sms, email or whatever.

Any ideas for what to hit with that curl GET/POST/PUT/WHATEVER request?

Can you be more specific? First you said that you cant rely on email, after you said "send an sms, email or whatever" — Marcelo Bittencourt, Oct 26 '11 at 19:55
Marcelo: I realize that could be confusing. What I mean is that I'm not assuming sendmail to be installed/configured on the system where I'm running the task. The system that receives the GET request could have mail, sms etc features for notification. — Pimin Konstantin Kefaloukos, Oct 27 '11 at 08:47

RobW · Answer 1 · 2011-10-26T20:56:05.813

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Does it have to be a service?

You can send an SMS message via sendmail.

You can use twitter

You can use Facebook

edited Oct 26 '11 at 20:56

answered Oct 26 '11 at 20:34

RobW

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quanta is right. Trying the twit script gives: Basic authentication is not supported. – Pimin Konstantin Kefaloukos Oct 27 '11 at 09:00
I'm specifically not relying on anything but curl, so sendmail is not an option. I mean service in the broadest sense (anything that accepts a GET request), so twitter would have been good, if it worked. – Pimin Konstantin Kefaloukos Oct 27 '11 at 09:08

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 26 '11 at 20:01

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I made this simple bash script as a nagios check, to download a file using curl and verify if the contents MD5 matches a provided value...

You can easily modify it to your needs...

https://github.com/mabitt/mab-nagios-plugins/blob/master/check_urlmd5.sh

answered Oct 26 '11 at 20:01

Marcelo Bittencourt

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Thanks for the reply, and for sharing code, but I think you misunderstood my question. – Pimin Konstantin Kefaloukos Oct 27 '11 at 09:04

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 27 '11 at 03:04

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I just notice that:

if you want to know your command executed successfully or not, check the exit status with $?.
Twitter no longer supports basic authentication. Take a look at Tweepy or Twurl.

answered Oct 27 '11 at 03:04

quanta

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I would +1 for both the status and pointing out the problem with basic auth, but I just started using serverfault (rating too low :-)). – Pimin Konstantin Kefaloukos Oct 27 '11 at 09:02
I'll look at Tweepy/Twurl and get back to you with a possible accepted answer :-) – Pimin Konstantin Kefaloukos Oct 27 '11 at 09:05

using curl to trigger a notification over http e.g. when a long running task has completed?

3 Answers3