I wrote this a while ago, and it’s been in use ever since: a very
simple script which counts down (or up) while printing the remaining
time. Controlled with standard job control, it’s one up on sleep as
you can see how long is left. This is occasionally handy; if I only
have ten seconds on the clock before lunch I’ll not start something
new, but if I’ve got fifteen it might make sense.
When elapsed, it exits. So chain it:
countdown.py 10m && tput bel && notify-send "Elapsed!"
Better still, just drop that in an alias.
Code is on gitlab but you could probably write it in the time it took you to read this. So I wonder why no such basic utility seems to exist in the package managers?