How to know a new message arrived

[Rafael Almeida]

Hello,

I'm using the xmonad window manager with dzen2 status bar. That status
bar just print on the screen the string it gets from the pipe. For
instance, if I want to see the time on the status bar I'd need to
write a script such as:
  #!/bin/sh
  while true ; do
      au=`date +"%H.%M %a %b %d"`
      printf "%s |%s\n" "$au" "$ut"
      sleep 60
  done
and then call dzen2 like this:

% status | dzen2

where status is the script I just described.

Now, I want the "status" script to print "New message!" when I get new
message on pidgin. So I figure I'd use the pidgin-remote program. But
I can't find the function that would tell me if there's unseen
messages and I don't know how to get all the dbus interface so I can
see all the functions I'm able to call from pidgin-remote.

Is there a better way to achive what I want (I don't want to change
window manager)? If not, what function should I call?

Thank you for the attention,
Rafael