Simple Alarm Clock Script For Linux

TL;DR: Install python-dateutil, pytimeparse, and this script, then see the --help output for more details.

For a while, I’d been using the at command to schedule alarms when I needed to wake up in the morning, but I found that it was a fragile solution because of how MPlayer and its descendants interacted with PulseAudio’s session-centric setup and the presence or absence of a video output.

…and you really don’t want a fragile solution for your alarm clock, so I decided to write a little helper script that could run inside my quake-style terminal in my user session so it would Just Work™.

You’ll want to edit the hard-coded media player command it uses to actually play the alarm, but, otherwise, it should be pretty polished for something I just hacked together for my own use.

It’ll accept arguments in two forms:

• wakeme at 6am
• wakeme in 3 hours

(It accepts a great many formats for times and durations, so I’ll just point you at the docs for dateutil.parser.parse() (times) and pytimeparse (durations) for the complete list.)

Either one will cause it to echo back its interpretation of what you asked for (so you can double-check that it understood properly) and then sleep until it’s time to wake you.

Installation is as simple as:

1. Make sure Python 2.x is installed (I haven’t tested 3.x)
2. Install python-dateutil
3. Install pytimeparse
4. Put wakeme in your PATH

Simple Alarm Clock Script For Linux by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.