I'd love to have a CLI alarm clock and came up with this: echo 'gnome-open /home/me/alarm.ogg' | at 09:15

Any ideas why above doesn't work, or anything along those lines?

I've found an answer:

echo 'cvlc /home/user/alarm.wav' | at 08:47

This works perfectly (by using the command line mode of VLC)!

Solution 1:

See edited section of the question: This works absolutely fine (with terminal closed etc):

echo 'cvlc /home/user/alarm.ogg' | at 08:49

Solution 2:

It won't work because gnome-open targets usually require a $DISPLAY. It also won't work for other such uses since stdout is redirected to mail by at.

The alarm-clock-applet for Gnome is available in the Ubuntu repositories and elsewhere.