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I've been trying to write a shell script that will interface with cmus and then notify me of the track info using notify-send. Right now it is not working, mainly because xargs does not seem to pass 2 arguments to notify-send. It only sends one and I cannot figure out why. I've done everything I can think of with sed to get the right output but it doesn't work. Also, if I use notify-send with two arguments, it works, so I don't think it's a problem with notify-send.

The output of cmus-remote -Q is:

status paused
file /home/dennis/music/Coheed And Cambria/GOODAP~1/05 Crossing the Frame.mp3
duration 207
position 120
tag artist Coheed & Cambria
tag album Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness
tag title Crossing the Frame
tag date 2005
tag genre Rock
tag tracknumber 5
tag albumartist Coheed & Cambria
set aaa_mode all
set continue true
set play_library true
set play_sorted false
set replaygain disabled
set replaygain_limit true
set replaygain_preamp 6.000000
set repeat false
set repeat_current false
set shuffle true
set softvol false
set vol_left 100
set vol_right 100

My code is terrible. I'm just starting to learn shell scripting so sorry about that.

#!/bin/sh
#
# notify of song playing

info="$(cmus-remote -Q)"

title="`echo "$info" | grep 'tag title' | sed "s/'//g" | sed 's/tag title \(.*\)/'\''\1'\''/g'`"

artist="`echo "$info" | grep 'tag artist' | sed "s/'//g" | sed 's/tag artist \(.*\)/ '\''\1/g'`"
album="`echo "$info" | grep 'tag album ' | sed "s/'//g" | sed 's/tag album \(.*\)/ \1'\''/g'`"

stupid="${title}${artist}$album"
echo "$stupid" | xargs notify-send
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  • and if there's a better way to do this I'm definitely open to suggestions :)
    – Dennis
    Jun 18, 2011 at 2:24

1 Answer 1

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xargs is working as intended; each line is taken as a parameter. If you want multiple parameters, separate them with newlines.

{echo "$title"; echo "$artist"; echo "$album"} | xargs notify-send

That said, you're doing far too much work for something quite simple:

title="$(echo "$info" | sed -n 's/^tag title //p')"
artist="$(echo "$info" | sed -n 's/^tag artist //p')"
album="$(echo "$info" | sed -n 's/^tag album //p')"
notify-send "$title" "$artist" "$album"

(Also note one other gotcha: notify-osd sends the messages it's passed through Pango, so you need to escape anything that might be mistaken for Pango markup. This means <, >, and & in practice, much as with HTML and XML. The above doesn't try to handle this.)

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  • I can only have two arguments. The first is the "title" and the second is the rest of the info. However for some reason when I do say: notify-send "$title" "$artist" the notification only shows the $title and not the $artist
    – Dennis
    Jun 18, 2011 at 2:30
  • @Dennis: then I would check for embedded newlines or carriage returns. You can also combine the artist and album while leaving the title separate; and, not all that widely known, notify-send uses Pango so you need to escape any Pango markup in your strings (like HTML, you need to watch out for <, >, and &).
    – geekosaur
    Jun 18, 2011 at 2:34
  • ran them through tr -d '\n' but no luck
    – Dennis
    Jun 18, 2011 at 2:48
  • Ah you were right. It was the Pango. I tried it without the & and that fixed it. Is there a way I could pass the argument through and keep the ampersand? By the way thanks a bunch.
    – Dennis
    Jun 18, 2011 at 2:52
  • Same as with HTML: replace < with &lt;, > with &gt;, and & with &amp;.
    – geekosaur
    Jun 18, 2011 at 3:01

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