Martin mentions one way to avoid getting distracted while waiting for jobs to finish. Working in an office I can’t hear sounds unless I happen to have my headphones on, and even then it might get drowned out by the music.

Instead I have this little script …

#!/bin/bash

eval $@
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    kdialog --msgbox "Command '$@' in $PWD completed." 2> /dev/null
else
    kdialog --error "Command '$@' in $PWD failed!" 2> /dev/null
fi

Which you use like so …

concordia ~/src/work/kexec$ mn make

And when it’s finished it pops up a dialog on your current virtual desktop, which is pretty hard to ignore. Back to work!