what's the cygwin/Windows equivalent of Linux' notify-send

Question

Linux has the command notify-send for sending user notifications to the desktop manager. (In many environments, these show up as pop-ups in the corner of the screen, along with low battery warnings and other system messages.) I use it in monitoring and back-up scripts.

Cygwin doesn't seem to have lib-notify, so is there a Windows equivalent for this command? Web searching has lead me to articles about running batch files from Windows' system tray/notification area, or attempts to clean the system tray up from a batch file, but I haven't found a way to produce unobtrusive user messages from background processes.

[`cygwin-ports`](http://sourceware.org/cygwinports/) promises to include notify-send, but I don't seem to be able to install it. Not sure if it's a compatibility or firewall issue at this stage. — Michael Scheper, Apr 26 '13 at 03:01
Cygwin Ports provides `notify-send` in the `libnotify` package. You will also need a running daemon (any of `notification-daemon`, `mate-notification-daemon`, `xfce4-notifyd`, `notify-osd`, `qtnotifydaemon`, or those builtin to the KDE and Razor-Qt desktop sessions). — Yaakov, Mar 12 '14 at 23:12
Toast notifications? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh868259.aspx — SSS, Dec 03 '14 at 02:37

score 17 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 30 '13 at 09:52

17

You can try notifu. It's a kind of command line notification app, so you can use it in cygwin.

Usage: notifu /p title /m message

edited Aug 30 '13 at 09:52

Prof. Falken

24,226
19
100
173

answered May 12 '13 at 19:09

CodexVarg

502
1
6
20

2

`-bash: notifu: command not found` Apparently it's available [here](http://www.paralint.com/projects/notifu/); I haven't tried it yet. – Keith Thompson May 12 '13 at 20:17
This worked for me in Cygwin. I did a `ls -l && /c/notifu-1.6/notifu64 /m "This is a simple Notifu message."` – Ashutosh Jindal Sep 13 '13 at 07:18

score 8 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:18

8

Windows has had this feature since the NT3.51 days that model after the wall(1) command in UNIX. For Pre vista,7,8 systems the command is net send:

net send * "Message"

On newer and professional versions it is msg.exe:

msg "%username%" "Hello World"
msg * "Message"

Samba even has support for the older notification protocol: echo "Hello world" | smbclient -NM HomePC

While for the new post Vista versions one needs to use PsExec/winexe. See the Ubuntu:SE Article on message to windows 7 for more details.

edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:18

Community

1
1

answered Sep 02 '15 at 18:44

Dwight Spencer

1,472
16
22

I'm on Windows 10 and `msg` isn't on my path. `net` is, but it doesn't have `send` in its documentation. – Daniel Kaplan Jul 24 '21 at 21:49
@daniel kaplan, Net send was dropped from vista and on. while msg.exe exists on pro and server editions as part of the messenger service. https://superuser.com/questions/1379843/windows-10-msg-command-mystery – Dwight Spencer Dec 14 '21 at 09:25

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 06 '17 at 07:15

Try this (for Windows 10+):

https://github.com/Windos/BurntToast

Install via Powershell (as administrator)

Install-Module -Name BurntToast
New-BTAppId
Import-Module BurntToast
New-BurntToastNotification

You can run Powershell commands inside Cygwin by doing powershell.exe -Command 'New-BurntToastNotification'.

what's the cygwin/Windows equivalent of Linux' notify-send

3 Answers3