I have a cron task that runs periodically. This task depends on a condition to be valid in order to complete its processing. In case it matters this condition is just a SELECT for specific records in the database. If the condition is not satisfied (i.e the SELECT does not return the result set expected) then the script exits immediately.
This is bad as the condition would be valid soon enough (don't know how soon but it will be valid due to the run of another script).
So I would like somehow to make the script more robust. I thought of 2 solutions:
Put a while loop and sleep constantly until the condition is
valid. This should work but it has the downside that once the script
is in the loop, it is out of control. So I though to additionally
after waking up to check is a specific file exists. If it does it
"understands" that the user wants to "force" stop it.
Once the script figures out that the condition is not valid yet it
appends a script in crontab and stops. That seconds script
continually polls for the condition and if the condition is valid
then restart the first script to restart its processing. This solution to me it seems to work but I am not sure if it is a good solution. E.g. perhaps programatically modifying the crontab is a bad idea?
Anyway, I thought that perhaps this problem is common and could have a standard solution, much better than the 2 I came up with. Does anyone have a better proposal? Which from my ideas would be best? I am not very experienced with cron tasks so there could be things/problems I could be overseeing.
instead of programmatically appending the crontab, you might want to consider using at to schedule the job to run again at some time in the future. If the script determines that it cannot do its job now, it can simply schedule itself to run again a few minutes (or a few hours, as it may) later by way of an at command.
Following up from our conversation in comments, you can take advantage of conditional execution in a cron entry. Supposing you want to branch based on time of day, you might use the output from date.
For example: this would always invoke the first command, then invoke the second command only if the clock hour is currently 11:
echo 'ScriptA running' ; [ $(date +%H) == 11 ] && echo 'ScriptB running'
More examples!
To check the return value from the first command:
echo 'ScriptA' ; [ $? == 0 ] echo 'ScriptB'
To instead check the STDOUT, you can use as colon as a noop and branch by capturing output with the same $() construct we used with date:
: ; [ $(echo 'ScriptA') == 'ScriptA' ] && echo 'ScriptB'
One downside on the last example: STDOUT from the first command won't be printed to the console. You could capture it to a variable which you echo out, or write it to a file with tee, if that's important.
Related
I have data flowing through a Linux box and a custom command that prints the data as it flows to STDOUT (the screen). I want to detect if data is flowing and restart some processes if it's not.
Let's say my test file is "flowchk.sh". How do I use that in a conditional statement in a shell script? My plan so far has been to push the data to a file then check to see if the file has any data in it:
timeout 5s flowchk.sh > anythinghere
FILENAME=./anythinghere
MAXSIZE=5000
FILESIZE=$(stat -c%s FILENAME)
if (( FILESIZE > MAXSIZE )); then
echo "all ok"
else
restarteverything!
fi
This has run into problems because the timeout command doesn't terminate properly when using my flowchk script (never returns to the command prompt). So I either need help figuring out how to stop flowchk's execution after a period of time (or it will run forever) so I can test the temp file to see if there's anything there OR I need to know if there's a better way to approach this problem and I'm wasting time.
I'm trying to check if a number differs from what it was last time it was checked, in this case checking a number every minute, using Linux scripts and cron.
eg:
newNum = getNum()
if oldNum != newNum: run some code
oldNum = newNum
(repeat every minute using crontab)
But the problem I am having is that the variables aren't accessible between scripts and using source (eg. source script.sh) runs the script again, hence getting the latest version, not the one from a minute ago.
The best I've got is running a first script which gets the current number, then sleeps for a minute, then runs a second script which is essentially the first two lines of the code above.
eg:
oldNum = getNum()
sleep 60
export oldNum
script2.sh
This seems inefficient to me and I'd like to know if there is a better solution if possible.
You could cache the previous number in a file:
number_cache=/path/to/cache_file
# read the previous number
oldNum=$(< "$number_cache" )
# acquire the new number
newNum=$(getNum)
if [[ "$oldNum" -eq "$newNum" ]]; then
do_something
fi
# cache the new number
printf "%d\n" "$newNum" > "$number_cache"
I have a (bash) script on a server that I have inherited the administration aspect of, and have recently discovered a flaw in the script that nobody has brought to my attention.
After discovering the issue, others have told me that it has been irritating them, but never told me (great...)
So, the script follows this concept
#!/bin/bash
function refreshscreen(){
# This function refreshes a "statistics screen"
...
echo "Enter command to override update"
read -t 10 variable
}
This script refreshes a statistics screen, and allows the user to stall the update in lieu of commands built into a case statement. However, the read times-out (read -t 10) after 10 seconds, regardless of if the user is typing.
Long story short, is there a way to prevent read from timing out if the user is actively typing a command? Best case scenario would be a "Time out of SEC idle/inactive seconds" opposed to just timeout after x seconds.
I have thought about running a background script at the end of the cycle before the read command pauses the screen to check for inactivity, but have not found a way to make that command work.
You can use read in a loop, reading one character at a time, and adding it to a final read string. This would then give the user some timeout amount of time per character rather than per command. Here's a sample function you might be able to incorporate into your script that shows what I'm talking about:
read_with_idle_timeout() {
local input=""
read -t 10 -N 1 variable
while [ ! -z $variable ]
do
input+=$variable
read -t 10 -N 1 variable
done
echo "Read: $input"
}
This will give the user 10 seconds to type each character. If they stop typing, you'll get as much of the command as they had started typing before the timeout occurred, and then your case statement can handle it. Perhaps you can store the final string in a global variable, or just put this code directly into your other function.
If you need more than one word, since read breaks on $IFS, you could call this function multiple times until you get all the input you're expecting.
I have searched for a simple solution that will do the following:
timeout after 10 seconds, if there is no user input at all
the user has infinite time to finish his answer if the first character was typed within the first 10 sec.
This can be implemented in two lines as follows:
read -N 1 -t 10 -p "What is your name? > " a
[ "$a" != "" ] && read b && echo "Your name is $a$b" || echo "(timeout)"
In case the user waits 10 sec before he enters the first character, the output will be:
What is your name? > (timeout)
If the user types the first character within 10 sec, he has unlimited time to finish this task. The output will look like follows:
What is your name? > Oliver
Your name is Oliver
Caveat: the first character is not editable, once it was typed, while all other characters can be edited (backspace and re-type). Any ideas for a simple solution?
I am looking for some help with awk and bash commands,
my project have an embedded (so very limited) hardware,
i need to run a specific command called "digitalio show"
the command output is:
Input=0x50ff <-- last char only change
Output=0x7f
OR
Input=0x50fd <-- last char only change
Output=0x7f
i need to extract the input parameter and convert it into either Active or Passive and log them to a file with timestamp.
the log file should look like this:
YYMMDDhhmmss;Active
YYMMDDhhmmss;Passive
YYMMDDhhmmss;Active
YYMMDDhhmmss;Passive
while logging only changes
The command "digitalio show" is an embedded specific command that give the I/O state at the time of the execution, so i basically need to log every change in the I/O into a file using a minimal tools i have in the embedded H/W.
i can run the command for every 500msec, but if i will log all the outputs i can finish the flash very quickly, so i need only log changes.
in the end this will run as a background deamon.
Thanks !
Rotem.
As far as I understand, a single run of digitalio show command outputs two lines in the following format:
Input=HEX_NUMBER
Output=0x7f
where HEX_NUMBER is either 0x50ff, or 0x50fd. Suppose, the former stands for "Active", the latter for "Passive".
Running the command once per 500 milliseconds requires keeping the state. The most obvious implementation is a loop with a sleep.
However, sleep implementations vary. Some of them support a floating point argument (fractional seconds), and some don't. For example, the GNU implementation accepts arbitrary floating point numbers, but the standard UNIX implementation guarantees to suspend execution for at least the integral number of seconds. There are many alternatives, though. For instance, usleep from killproc accepts microseconds. Alternatively, you can write your own utility.
Let's pick the usleep command. Then the Bash script may look like the following:
#!/bin/bash -
last_state=
while true ; do
i=$(digitalio show | awk -F= '/Input=0x[a-zA-Z0-9]+/ {print $2}')
if test "$i" = "0x50ff" ; then
state="Active"
else
state="Passive"
fi
if test "$state" != "$last_state" ; then
printf '%s;%s\n' $(date '+%Y%m%d%H%M%S') "$state"
fi
last_state="$state"
usleep 500000
done
Sample output
20161019103534;Active
20161019103555;Passive
The script launches digitalio show command in an infinite loop, then extracts the hex part from Input lines with awk.
The $state variable is assigned to whether "Active", or "Passive" depending on the value of hex string.
The $last_state variable keeps the value of $state in the last iteration. If $state is not equal to $last_state, then the state is printed to the standard output in the specific format.
When I schedule a job with 'at' it is assigned an id, viz:
job 44 at 2014-01-28 17:30
When that job runs I would like to get at that id from within it. This is on Centos, FWIW. I have established that no environment variable contains the ID. When the Perl code in that job runs I would like it to be able to print the job ID (44 in this example).
Yes, I know that atq shows an = next to jobs that are executing, but there might be more than one of those at a time.
I could do something like pass a unique argument to the job when scheduling it, capture the ID, save that and the argument to a file somewhere, read that from the job. That's a lot of work I'd rather not go to if I don't have to, and it seems like this should be simple but I'm drawing a blank.
What follows is figured out by reading sources of at-3.14. The way at puts job id and the time when it is run into the file name should be similar for any version, but I haven't checked this.
To begin whith at encodes the job id and the time when a particular job should be run into the file name describing a job. The file name has format aJJJJJTTTTTTTT, where JJJJJ is 5 character hexadecimal string, the job id, and TTTTTTTT is an 8 character hexadecimal string, the time when the job should be run. The time is stored as seconds from the epoch.
At jobs are run by feeding a job description file as the standard input to sh -c. Fortunately the Linux kernel provides a symbolic link, /proc/self/fd/0, which will point to the standard input of the process currently being executed (play with ls -l /proc/self/fd/0 in case you need to assure yourself that this indeed is so).
A file describing a job has been deleted by the time a job is run. However, the file is still available for the kernel because it has been duplicated with dup(2) before being used as the standard input for a job. So, actually we are resolving a symbolic link to a file name which is not visible any more. In the perl script at the end we need to take this into account as readlink will return something like /foo/bar/baz (deleted) instead of /foo/bar/baz. And we're interested in just the file name which has all the information we need.
The reason why the symbolic link points to a deleted file is because at daemon unlinks the original before executing the job. Unlinking gets done only after creating a copy, a hard link, which begins with = instead of a. With this the at daemon tries to ensure there will be only one copy of a job running: the daemon will not execle(2), ie. it will bail out, should the link(2) fail. Because the original file has been subject to open(2) and dup(2) the inode is still there for the kernel to use because it still has hard links pointing to it.
After a fairly long and possibly confusing introduction, here is how to put it all together:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $job_file = readlink("/proc/self/fd/0");
if (index($job_file, " ") > 0) {
$job_file = substr($job_file, 0, index($job_file, " ") - 1);
}
my $tmp = substr($job_file, rindex($job_file, "/") + 1);
$tmp =~ s/^a([0-9a-f]{5})[0-9a-f]+/$1/;
my $job_id = hex($tmp);
if ($job_id > 0) {
printf("My AT job id is %d.\n", $job_id);
}
# end of file.