notify-send-all

Send a pop-up notification message to all users logged into a machine. Similar to the wall command, but for graphical logins (X & Wayland).

Messages are sent asynchronously, not blocking, but --action can still be used to wait for a response from each user. Responses are prefixed with the username and a TAB.

Installation

It's just a shell script. Download notify-send-all, make it executable, and put it in your path. Or clone the repository, and add the working copy to your path.

wget raw.githubusercontent.com/hackerb9/notify-send-all/main/notify-send-all
chmod +x notify-send-all
sudo mv notify-send-all /usr/local/bin/

Requirements

Users must be logged in graphically (X or Wayland) with dbus and a notification daemon running. This program does not yet work for users logged in on the console.

Usage

notify-send-all [options] <message>

Simple usage

notify-send-all "My hovercraft is full of eels"

More complex example

notify-send-all --urgency=critical \\
                --action=run="Run away!" \\
                --action=hide="Hide!" \\
                "Warning: Nuclear launch imminent"

Click to see example output

andy		run
circus		hide
hackerb9	run

Bugs

-?, --help only works correctly if it is the first argument.
If a user is logged in on a console instead of a graphical session (X or Wayland), then notify-send hangs for a long time before timing out on StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.Notifications. This seems to be a bug in libnotify-1.8.1.

This bug is also triggered when the user is logged in on both console and graphical sessions and logged into the console first. In that case, not only does notify-send hang, but notifications will not show up at all in the graphical session.

Bonus commands

notify-send-to

If you make a symlink called notify-send-to, you can use it to send a pop up notification to a single user.

notify-send-others

If you make a symlink called notify-send-others, you can use it to send a pop up notification to all users but yourself.