Ocassionally one wants to give a script or program the opportunity to inform the user of some events – even if it is running hidden or in the background. For these cases KDE uses KNotify (a notification area in the systray). Since D-Bus has replaced DCOP, accessing KNotify has become more difficult. A small python script helps to do the job.

Enough talk, here’s the source code: (knotify.py)

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#!/usr/bin/python
import sys, dbus
knotify = dbus.SessionBus().get_object("org.kde.knotify", "/Notify")
try:    title, text = sys.argv[1:3]
except: print 'Usage: knotify.py title text'; sys.exit(1)
knotify.event("warning", "kde", [], title, text, [], [], 0, 0,\
dbus_interface="org.kde.KNotify")

A direct qdbus-call does not seem to be possible since the called method expects a QVariantList as argument, which cannot be provided using the bash. That’s why i had to write the python script.