Only Run Shell Command If it Exists

As part of my day to day flow, I use the excellent noti to create a notification on Mac when a long-running command line job finished. This should also work on Linux and Windows.

Using noti is pretty straightforward:

longRunningCommand | noti

The above command will run and will call noti once it is done which triggers a notification.

You can also tell noti what title to use:

longRunningCommand | noti -t "Super long job complete!"

I regularly use this in build scripts but not all my colleagues do. To get around this we can tell our scripts to only run noti if it is present. We do this as follows:

if type noti > /dev/null;then noti -t "DONE - Super long script"; fi

The then part of the if statement is only hit if noti exists otherwise nothing will happen.

This line can easily be slotted into a makefile target or/and a bash script.