tail -f development.log

Most OS X users are using or have heard about Growl, the OS X notification system. I use a growl tool called growlnotify from several different scripts to give me notification alerts during script execution. In particular, I spend quite a bit of time doing Ruby coding and using autotest.

The problem is that growlnotify doesn’t play nicely with Leopard and only actually gives notifications about 15% of the time (my rough estimation). This isn’t a show stopper for me with autotest, but it has been quite an annoyance, so I finally set out today to try and find a solution.

Fortunately, after only about 5 minutes I came across a blog post by Hans Fugal with a solution.

What I did was create a new shell script that I simply called growl with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
wrappee=/usr/local/bin/growlnotify
exec $wrappee -w "$@" &

I then moved growl to my bin directory:

mv growl /usr/local/bin

and now just use the growl command from my scripts instead of calling growlnotify directly.