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)

  • Vector@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    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:

    • You can use pgrep to detect if a process with a given name is running
    • You can write to /dev/pts/0 to trigger a desktop notification
    • You can drop it into a cron job to run it automatically on a schedule

    As a test, the following command will look for a process called syncthing and 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:

    1. open a terminal
    2. open the editor with crontab -e (if you need to pick an editor, nano will probably be your best bet, it’s easiest to use)
    3. in the editor, add the following line to the end of the file: 0 * * * * pgrep syncthing || echo "Syncthing is not running" > /dev/pts/0
      • The 0 * * * * sets up the schedule (on the 0th minute of every hour, every day of the month, every month, on every day of the week)
      • Everything after that is the command to run
    4. save and quit

    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_DIR to step (4) [edit-3] removed references to libnotify, replace with /dev/pts/0 (Nice one, @sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works !)

    • Stopwatch1986@lemmy.mlOP
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      5 hours ago

      I went for this one and it works with both notify-send and /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.