Mini Project: terminal color change depending on the time of day

Question

Good evening,

I am new to Unix, so perhaps this mini-project is too ambitious. Hoping someone can point in the right direction.

Work in the cab, and I do not see the light outside. In general, I use the yellow terminal in the morning (sunny) and black / green, past 3:00 (night).

What I would like to do (partly just practicing my bash). Is to write a script that at 3:00 will change the color of all my terminals. If that works, I can make them change every hour or something. Would that be safe? Is it possible?

Here are some of my specs: Solaris 10 Bash Gnome Shell

I'm looking at it right now: Programmatically change the theme of the Gnome terminal

Answer 1

If I did, I would start with PROMPT_COMMAND . Bash will run this script just before the tooltip is displayed.

You have several options. You may have a script inside PROMPT_COMMAND:

PROMPT_COMMAND='if [ is_morning ]; then echo "MORNING_COLORS'; else echo "EVENING_COLORS"; fi 

Or you could run PROMPT_COMMAND an external command (which could also be a Bash script or you could use a different language if you want) to do all the work there:

 PROMPT_COMMAND=/path/to/setcolor_timeofday 

The only hole that I see in this is that if you have a program that works when the time changes (for example, using tail -f to view the file), the background will not change until you return to Bash.

Answer 2

Changing the background color of the foreground and background using PS1 in bash will be the easiest thing that others are talking about here. The R Samuel Klatchko approach with PROMPT_COMMAND is probably the most universal. However, this has its drawbacks. bash can only use "boring" background colors, and its foreground / background colors can be canceled by any application. Modifying the Gnome Terminal theme programmatically, especially in real time, will be much more difficult, but will give much more beautiful results.

Answer 3

Use cron , this is a Unix task scheduler. And install it to run a command that modifies .bashrc, as in the question you linked. The problem is that it will only work for new terminals, if you open them, it will not change them.