Please, folks, stop posting these "I thought this was going to be about X" comments.

I’m never going to understand why HN frowns upon humor so much.

Humor is fine. Humor as the only substance of a comment just wastes everyone's time.

Especially when this particular joke is never actually funny.

Me neither. I think the trick is to make it really, really dry and deadpan, then the humourless don't even notice and others have can have a little chuckle.

If you don't quash quips it gets all redditty.

As I have said before in response to similar comments: HN has no problem with humour. Where it differs from, say, typical reddits is that in order to get upvoted rather than dowvoted, humorous comments have to actually be funny.

It's offtopic.

Combining the two (well, the name and your comment) I'd love a poke command that acts like tee but sends a notification when the calling process ends.

  ./backup.sh | poke username

Where username would accept a system user, phone number, email address, webhook url, whatever.

It should be reversed:

poke username -- path/to/command arg1 arg2

The command would fork, execute the child, wait for the child to finish, then send out its notification.

This would also allow flags like:

poke --on-failure @koolba -- path/to/foo

Or even handling the child taking too long:

poke --on-lagging 20m @koolba -- path/to/something-that-might-hang

Is the point of the pipe that the notification should include the output of the command like the following?

  ./backup.sh | ( notify-send "$(cat)" )

though that could also be written:

  notify-send "$(./backup.sh)"

If you also want the output in the terminal, you could use tee:

  ./backup.sh | tee >(notify-send "$(cat)")

If you want it to be an email or SMS, there are probably commands that you could replace notify-send with.

Not really sure with pipe. It could probably just be &&'d with an optional message parameter to be fair.

Or sprinkle some AI on it and decide based on the destination. I wouldn't want a huge log being sent via sms but nbd for email.

> Or sprinkle some AI on it and decide based on the destination.

Or avoid that overcomplication and specify what you want. As the one writing the command, you should know if the output is big and what the ideal is for the destination you want.

You don't have to make it for me haha. This is not a product specification and I am not a demanding customer. It's a hypothetical command that popped into my head while browsing a site with hacker in the name.

It's also a command I could throw together in about an hour with a bit of bash if I really wanted it. Mix in a bit of curl, bit of whatever the sendmail command is these days, bit of Twilio. Job's a good'un.

For the record "sprinkle some AI on it" is if statements, it was a yoke.

Have it specified in a config file, and provide presets for common configurations (e.g. last line and exit code in SMS but full log in email).

It's not exactly what you describe, but you might find some use in the pv (pipe viewer) command: http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml

I thought this was clone Yo.

https://slate.com/business/2014/06/marc-andreessen-explains-...