A little snippet showing how to create a log function in bash that displays its log message in the Mac OS X notification center as well as on the console.

display-notification.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

function log()
{
    echo `date +"[%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S] "`$1

# Available Sounds:
# Basso, Blow, Bottle, Frog, Funk, Glass, Hero, 
# Morse, Ping, Pop, Purr, Sosumi, Submarine, Tink
    osascript << EOF
display notification "$1" with title "`basename $0`" sound name "Submarine"
EOF

    return
}

log "$*"