In this post, I will explain how to set up an alarm at the terminal.

Sometimes we need to set alarms while working on computer. In such cases, we can use the terminal instedad of phone, website or gui-app.

Basically, we are waiting for a certain time and play sound for alarm. We will use sleep command to wait for a certain time. To play audio we will use any media player that can work from terminal.

The parameter we write after the sleep command specifies the time we wait.

sleep 5s

(s->second, m->minute, h->hour)

We will use && to run two commands together in terminal.

command1 && command2

I will use MPV as the media player. First of all, let’s run command to add ppa of MPV. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/mpv-tests

MPV works like that

mpv filename

Let’s run our two commands together:

sleep 25m && mpv Music/alarm.ogg

After 25 minutes, the audio file we want it to play will be played. Setting up an alarm in the terminal is that simple.