EGG

Purpose

The purpose is to provide a small command line tool, which starts a timer and plays a sound, if the time is up. It follows the KISS principles, by focussing on this one purpose.

You may provide absolute points in time in the following formats:

• hh:mm:ss (Will play the sound at the absolute point in time in the timezone of the caller.)
• hh:mm

Or you provide a delta like so:

• 12m (Will play the sound in 12 minutes)
• 1h 12m 3s (Will play the sound in 1 hour 12 minutes and 3 seconds.)
• 1h12m3s

If you don't like the provided sound, you may specify your own sound using the environment variable EGG_SOUND.

Examples

egg 23:59:59  # Will start to play the sound just before midnight.

egg 6m        # Will tell you that your Egg is Ok in 6 minutes

EGG_SOUND="~/Music/Ac-DC/Hells-Bells.mp3" egg 3h # Will play your music in 3 hours

Technically

It will block the command line, if you don't spawn it to the background. There is no persistence or anything involved. The main implementation effort goes to the command line argument parsing using regex. If you escape blanks, this is considered as wrong.

Media

The included sound is a free sound file from Mixkit.

Caveats

If you terminate the process, e.g. by killing the terminal window, the sound will be never played.

The program detects, if it was started running on the terminal in the foreground or in the background. If it is running in the foreground, a countdown will be shown. Be aware, that there is a difference between running in background and suspending a foreground process. If the foreground process is suspended, no CPU is committed to it until it is brought back to the foreground. In the suspended state, no sound will be played until the process is brought back to the foreground.

Compiling

Please be aware, that the soloud library requires a cmake.

The release build tries to optimize for size as far as possible with the standard flags (see Cargo.toml#profile.release). All other steps will only gain another 10-15% but add severe complexity to the build process.

To make these additional optimization you may optimize the used libc for the needs of this application. To do so perform the following steps for your build:

rustc -vV | grep host

This will provide you with the information regarding your current environment e.g.: host: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu for a Linux machine or x86_64-apple-darwin for a MacOS system with x86 architecture.

Than you may compile the libc with the following command in this case optimized for a Linux system:

cargo +nightly build -Z build-std=std,panic_abort --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --release

For this to work, you must install a nightly tool chain, as only this nightly cargo version supports the -Z option. In addition you need also the sources to compile the libc.

rustup toolchain install nightly
rustup component add rust-src --toolchain nightly

Be aware that the result of this optimization is located in the folder: target/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/release/.