SSH GRASS Processing Status Check

I’ve been running some GRASS/PostGIS computations on a remote server that were taking hours to finish. Once in a while I checked for their state by issuing tail log_XX.log from my laptop to see if they were ready yet. It suddenly became pretty annoying to check five different logs every ten minutes.

Instead of waiting and checking the logs, I thought it would be great to automate this. And it would be awesome if checking was fun. So I wrote a simple routine that takes log number as an argument (every process logs to a separate logfile) and checks it every minute until it says done. Right after that notify-send gives me a neat popup and Queen starts playing their We are the champions thanks to mpg123.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
item=$1

while true; do
    echo "############ ${item} ############"
    x=$(ssh [email protected] "tail -n 30 path/to/my/log_${item}.log")

    if [[ $x == *"done"* ]]
        then
            notify-send -u critical "Finally ${item}"
            mpg123 -n 250 ~/Music/queen-we_are_the_champions.mp3
            exit
        else echo "Not yet"
    fi
    sleep 60
done

What seemed to be really frustrating makes me happy right now. Unless Freddie starts singing in the middle of the night.