indicate-task
A command line tool that displays an indicator / persistent notification for the duration of a long-running process (a task).
It has been tested on Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 15, but other distros may not yet have the required support in libnotify / appindicators.
It can also notify you when the task is complete, and allows you to cancel the task or view its output while it is running.
indicate-task echoes stdin to stdout as well as capturing it, so you can wrap a program in an indicator and still get the same output / return code.
Note: indicate task requires the python-appindicator package
on Ubuntu. I can't add this to the feed's dependency list, as it
doesn't exist (and isn't needed) in any other distro.