Is there a simple GUI application that will monitor running processes periodically and alert the user when a process is not running? The ones I have found are far too complex (eg Monit). I am sure this is trivial to achieve with a script, but I’d rather use a GUI.
A use case would look like this: every 60 minutes check if Syncthing is running and display a notification if it’s not. In my experience, Syncthing is very reliable when it launches successfully but there may be an issue with conflicting versions that may prevent it from running at boot. Syncthing has no way to alert the GUI user when something goes wrong and you may find after you left home that your laptop hasn’t synced. Checking manually is a headache, prone to errors and goes against the idea of fit and forget.
(Debian Trixie with KDE Plasma)
Hello! I don’t know of a desktop watchdog application that will do this for you, but you may be able to achieve this with a simple cron job. Probably just an hourly crontab entry that looks for a running process with the right name, and uses something like
notify-sendto send an alert if it’s not found. I’ll jump on the computer and have a quick play, though I run gnome not plasma so I don’t know how well it will translate.I know you’re looking for a desktop solution, but here’s something that you can try in case you can’t find one – I’m betting that having a solution is better than having none!
So I just had a quick muck around:
pgrepto detect if a process with a given name is running/dev/pts/0to trigger a desktop notificationAs a test, the following command will look for a process called
syncthingand send a desktop notification if it can’t find it:pgrep syncthing || echo "Syncthing is not running > /dev/pts/0"To set up a cron job:
crontab -e(if you need to pick an editor,nanowill probably be your best bet, it’s easiest to use)0 * * * * pgrep syncthing || echo "Syncthing is not running" > /dev/pts/00 * * * *sets up the schedule (on the 0th minute of every hour, every day of the month, every month, on every day of the week)If you ever want to get rid of it, just open the cron file again (
crontab -e) and remove the line.I gave this a go on KDE under Wayland and it seems to do the trick. Good luck, I hope you find what you’re looking for!
[edit-1] added step (2) to install libnotify-bin in case you don’t have it already. [edit-2] added
XDG_RUNTIME_DIRto step (4) [edit-3] removed references to libnotify, replace with /dev/pts/0 (Nice one, @sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works !)I went for this one and it works with both
notify-sendand/dev/pts/0. Not sure why it is better, but I opted for the latter. Simple, lightweight and versatile, suitable for any process.Any KDE Plasma users reading this, to enable notifications history for these you can follow the instructions here. Many thanks everyone.
It doesn’t work for me (using plasma). Also it seems to be using DBUS which I am not sure if it will work within a cron job.
A simple solution that works for me is something like this:
echo hello > /dev/pts/0I imagine
dbus-monitorshould work withcronbut probably if starting once DBUS is actually running (so not sure@rebootwould be sufficient)Oh very neat, that works great! A much better solution.
Good call on DBUS. Setting XDG_RUNTIME_DIR seems to be enough to fix it up, I’ll update my other response.