Hey, you've N outofdated packages!

I know…I should study instead of writing these stuff.

Anyway, I lost only 15 minutes to set up this:

I googled a bit around looking for a system tray notification applet for Arch Linux and I found many (alunn, pacman-notifier, yapan, zenman…), but some project is dead, someone uses (Py)GTK, someone requires to edit the sudoers file or to grant permissions to your package manager.

Not what I was looking for.

Then, I used 2 cron jobs to display a notify every hour using kdialog only if there are outofdated packages in the system.

The first one script updates the pacman database and goes in /etc/cron.hourly/:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/pacman --sync --refresh

Easy enough.

Then create this script somewhere and add it to your user crontab:

#!/bin/bash
pkgs=$(pacman -Qqu | wc -l)
aurpkgs=$(cower -ud | wc -l)

unset msg1
unset msg2
unset packages

if [[ ${pkgs} -gt 0 ]]; then
msg1="${pkgs} in pacman"
fi

if [[ ${aurpkgs} -gt 0 ]]; then
msg2=" ${aurpkgs} in AUR"
fi

let packages=${pkgs}+${aurpkgs}
if [[ ${packages} -gt 0 ]]; then
kdialog --title "Out-of-Date packages" --passivepopup "There are ${packages} outofdated packages (${msg1}${msg2})" 10
fi

exit 0

cower is my favorite AUR agent; edit the script to use your.

It’s rude, but it works and does its job.

Bye!

Note: when I was googling I found some user that had the “fantastic” idea to use cron to update its system. Please don’t do it! Really, you MUST read the output of your package manager. Ever.

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