terminal-notifier hangs when not connected to UI session

[schinckel]

Please check everything that applies to your issue:

• [x] I looked in closed issues and it has not already been answered
• [ ] My issue appeared with a terminal-notifier update
• [ ] I'm using a tool that uses terminal-notifier (guard-notifier, node-notifier...)

To help us debug your issue please include:

• macOS version Catalina
• terminal-notifier version 2.0.0
• installed using homebrew

When you ssh to a Mac that does not have a current UI session (ie, I restarted my Mac before going home from work, and started an ssh session from home), you can't use terminal-notifier as part of a workflow, because it just hangs.

I'm aware that there is "no point" in having a notification, because there is nowhere to view that notification. The problem I have is that the command stops executing, rather than throwing an exception.

I could have a workflow that just ignores the status code of the command, and continues.

In my case, I have a mercurial hook that posts a notification:

update.notifier = (/usr/local/bin/terminal-notifier -title Mercurial -subtitle 'Update successful' -contentImage ~/.mercurial.png -message "Parent revisions(s): $HG_PARENT1 $HG_PARENT2")

However, if I try to chain bash commands:

hg pull upstream && hg up && hg push --rev default

This fails to execute, because it stops when attempting to post the notification: and requires a Ctrl-C to regain control of my shell.

I think it should return a suitable error code when it is unable to connect to the session, rather than just print the error and wait:

$ /usr/local/bin/terminal-notifier 
2019-12-19 16:05:54.070 terminal-notifier[9995:39570] +[NSXPCSharedListener endpointForReply:withListenerName:]: an error occurred while attempting to obtain endpoint for listener 'ClientCallsAuxiliary': Connection interrupted

[schinckel]

(Ultimately, it would be amazing if you could have notifications appear on my local machine when I trigger them in a script on a remote machine, but I'm guessing that's way out of scope)

[eytanbiala]

Hey, I'm running into this issue as well - have you found any workaround aside from not using terminal-notifier?

[robertpeteuil]

Not sure if this is still unsolved for folks...

In my scripts that generate notifications, I populate a variable when connected remotely, then filter on it before notification.

# set SESSION_TYPE if connected remotely
if [ -n "$SSH_CLIENT" ] || [ -n "$SSH_TTY" ]; then
  SESSION_TYPE=remote/ssh
else
  case $(ps -o comm= -p "$PPID") in
    sshd|*/sshd) SESSION_TYPE=remote/ssh;;
  esac
fi

[[ -z "$SESSION_TYPE" ]] && echo "non-ssh session - trigger notification"