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I keep getting very strange notifications which go away before I can read them, they are long, and appear at random times, the most recently one came up was during a kernel upgrade, it had a strange icon, and was long, but I didn't manage to read it because it was on the screen so briefly.

So I am wondering if there is any log which logs all calls to notify-send which logs the program calling it, and all the parameters given? Or if I can set up such a log to find out what these notifications are about? I am running Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 with GNOME 3.18.

Jacob Vlijm
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    As far as i know notify-send does not support a forced logging. I do have a really ugly workaround in mind which should be the last option/resort: Start a screen-recording and record as long as needed until the message appears. Stop the recording, start playback, jump to related section & pause. Using screenshots might as well be an option if you can trigger them fast enough (i.e. print-screen-key) – dufte May 10 '16 at 11:22
  • @dufte: Is there not a way with aliases or something which would mean that a script is called instead of it which logs and then passes on the arguments to the real notify-send? –  May 10 '16 at 11:25
  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/105566/is-there-a-way-to-view-notification-history ? – DK Bose May 10 '16 at 11:34
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    I would think that a simple python script that listens on DBus for the correct messages, and writes them to a log file, would do very well. Not that I'm offering to write one :-D – Jos May 10 '16 at 11:37
  • If you are using Gnome, aren't they logged in then notifications menu? – Wilf May 10 '16 at 12:26

1 Answers1

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Even didn't need a full script...
...but put it in the form of a script:

#!/bin/bash

file=$1

dbus-monitor "interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications'" |\
 grep --line-buffered "string" |\
 grep --line-buffered -e method -e ":" -e '""' -e urgency -e notify -v |\
 grep --line-buffered '.*(?=string)|(?<=string).*' -oPi |\
 grep --line-buffered -v '^\s*$' |\
 xargs -I '{}' echo {} >> $file

To run it

  • Copy the "script" into an empty file, save it as keep_log.sh

  • Run it with the logfile as argument with the command

    /bin/bash /path/to/keep_log.sh /path/to/log.txt

The answer was retrieved from an earlier answer (not a dupe), in which this application of the method was mentioned as an example.

The answer I gave there, on its own turn, was based on this very nice answer, in which is explained that the method uses dbus-monitor to intercept the contents of notify-send. By editing the example there, we can make it write notify-send messages to a (log-) file.

Or, more elegant

...would be to add the date to the logfile, producing a logfile like:

---di 10 mei 2016 17:37:20 CEST---
SOme kind of a message!
---di 10 mei 2016 17:37:20 CEST---
The last message was misspelled so here i9s another one

In that case, the script would be:

#!/bin/bash

logfile=$1

dbus-monitor "interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications'" |\
grep --line-buffered "string" |\
grep --line-buffered -e method -e ":" -e '""' -e urgency -e notify -v |\
grep --line-buffered '.*(?=string)|(?<=string).*' -oPi |\
grep --line-buffered -v '^\s*$' |\
xargs -I '{}' \
printf "---$( date )---\n"{}"\n" >> $logfile
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Jacob Vlijm
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    Wait, sorry, I'm not sure I fully understand, where is the log stored? –  May 10 '16 at 12:27
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    @ParanoidPanda you can define your own path. I used /home/jacob/desktop/log.txt in my test. The file is created if it doesn't exist. – Jacob Vlijm May 10 '16 at 12:29
  • @ParanoidPanda ah, sorry, sorry, too much in a hurry... See update. – Jacob Vlijm May 10 '16 at 12:31
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    Ok, I see now sender=:1.918 -> destination=:1.16 serial=7 path=/org/freedesktop/Notifications; ... etc., but how can I determine who is sending it? – vladkras Dec 11 '17 at 11:26
  • @vladkras install d-feet and run it (a GUI app). It shows me, e.g., that org.freedesktop.Notifications on the Session Bus is associated with gnome-shell itself. And the notification I wanted to track down (an obvious one to log and get a timestamp for - ephemeral warnings that The volume “Filesystem root” has only xxx MB disk space remaining!) came from 1.49 which is gsd-housekeeping on the Session Bus. So now the question for gnome-shell is how to log notifications, like notify-osd did, I guess? – nealmcb Nov 04 '18 at 03:14
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    I'm getting this sometimes: Error: xargs: unmatched double quote; by default quotes are special to xargs unless you use the -0 option – nealmcb Nov 05 '18 at 14:06
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    @nealmcb see https://askubuntu.com/questions/842935/how-can-i-solve-unmatched-double-quote-error-using-dbus-monitor-in-combination – Jacob Vlijm Nov 05 '18 at 14:14
  • Thanks, @JacobVlijm. Can you make the change to fix this here? I.e. use xargs -d '\n' -I '{} – nealmcb Nov 05 '18 at 14:56
  • Thanks for the answer. I want to run one more command after the printf. Tried printf "---$( date )---\n"{}"\n" >> $logfile && echo hi and tried the echo in the new line. Neither worked. – Andrew Jan 17 '19 at 18:28
  • IIUC there's a problem: the dbus-monitor process runs only once but it handles multiple messages. As a result 1. the date is the same for all messages and 2. @Andrew your echo hi never appears. An idea to solve both problems could be to replace xargs with sth like while read msg; do date +"---%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S---"; echo "$msg"; done – user829755 Feb 06 '24 at 11:07