Snippet of zsh usefulness for long running interactive processes that sometimes fail.

[shae]

I used to do a lot of long running GHC builds, and would swap focus to some other xterm to work, and then switch back to look at the build process an hour later

Comments

[geekosaur]

Back when people used dumb terminals to talk to Unix systems, I had something like that which would (a) ring the terminal bell three times with 1-second pauses between and (b) set the VT100 LEDs to indicate that it was done and whether it had succeeded or failed.

[geekosaur]

Oh, and I bet you don't use that with quoted arguments. You want to replace the $* with "$@", or for compatibility with other Bourne-like shells (your code will otherwise work in any Bourne-like shell if you remove the parentheses in the function definitions) use ${1+"$@"}.