Hi,

On my computer, I have various scripts that run at certain times and
would like to be visually notified that they have been started. For
example, when my "updatedb" command is run or my hard drive performs a
backup of itself. It's partly for knowing that they are running when
they're meant to and so that I know why my hard drive is going crazy.
It would also be useful for things like auto-syncing an usb mp3 player
when it's plugged in.

What I would like is for a little system tray icon to appear when one
of the above commands start and then disappear when the command ends.
It would be nice to have some kind of feedback if the command failed
(maybe the icon changes colour, or a simple kdialog box pop-up would
work) but that's not a big problem.

I've tried playing around with kstart, kdialog and ksystraycmd and
can't get what I want working. Here's what I've tried so far:

#!/bin/bash
dcopRef=`ksystraycmd --hidden --icon joystick kdialog --progressbar
Test 4`

echo Sleeping...
sleep 2 # Real command goes here
echo Quitting...
dcop $dcopRef close

The first line starts up a kdialog command and the ksystraycmd part
should create a system tray icon. I then grab the DCOP reference so
that I can kill the tray icon when my command is complete. Problems
I've found are that ksystraycmd won't return so I can get the dcop
reference until the command (kdialog here) returns. If I use
--progressbar, it returns immediately with a DCOP reference but no tray
icon appears. I'm not sure what kind of feedback would be good when you
click the system tray icon, but I'm not too bothered. I've just used a
progress bar because ksystraycmd won't work if you don't give it a KDE
application.

I also tried:
ksystraycmd --hidden --icon joystick konsole -e sleep 2

This works ok, but you can see the konsole flashing up as it starts and
when you click the icon the konsole will appear, so it looks quite
hacky.