How to call a bash script automatically when directory contents chage - linux

My goal is to run a bash script automatically whenever any new file is added to a particular directory or any subdirectory of that particular directory.
Detail Scenario:
I am creating an automated process for file submission from teachers to students and vice versa. Sender will upload file and it will be stored inside the Uploads directory in the LAMP server in the format, ex. "name_course-name_filename.pdf". I want some method so that when any file stored inside the Uploads folder, the same time a script will be called and send that file to the list of receives.
From the database I can find the list of receiver for that particular course and student.
The only concern of mine is, how to call a script automatically and make it work on individual file whenever the content of the directory changes. Cron will do in intervals but not a real time work.

Linux provides a nice mechanism for that purpose which is called inotify. inotify is mostly available as a C API. But there have been developed shell utilities as well. You should use inotifywait from inotifytools (pkg name in debian) for this. Here comes a basic example:
#!/bin/bash
directory="/tmp" # or whatever you are interested in
inotifywait -m -e create "$directory" |
while read folder eventlist eventfile
do
echo "the following events happened in folder $folder:"
echo "$eventlist $eventfile"
done
Update:
If the problem goes complicated, for example you'll have to monitor recursive, dynamic directory structures, you should have a look at incron It's a cron like daemon which executes scripts on certain events. But the events are file system events rather than timer events.

There is another option to 'inotifywait':
-d --daemon
Same as --monitor, except run in the background logging events to a file
that must be specified by --outfile. Implies --syslog.
For completeness:
-m --monitor
Instead of exiting after receiving a single event, execute indefinitely.
The default behaviour is to exit after the first event occurs.
Within the do-done block of your 'while' statement, you might parse each event report for interesting details then use 'case-esac' to take action based on each event that you care about.
For something that you plan to rely on for your operations, you might also consider replacing the hard-coded '$directory' with some sort of configuration file. Such a file might include the path and filename, the interesting events for that path and file, and a script to run when those events happened.
The script might take the list of events as parameters and then 'case-esac' again.
Just one man's ramblins,
~~~ 8d;-Dan

Related

Want to create a specific script for my Raspberry Pi to watch directory and do some actions

I am a complete newbie in writing scripts, I have just started a few days ago, and was already able to create simple scripts to find files, move them, delete them, etc...
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspberry Pi OS installed on it.
Now I want to create a better script, using "inotify" to monitor a specific directory and performs some actions if some specific files are found. Aaaaaand, I am a bit lost.
Here is what I have found and tested :
MONITORDIR="/my_dir"
inotifywait -m -r -e create --format '%w%f' "${MONITORDIR}" | while read NEWFILE
do
...
With this, I can generate an action whenever any new file appeared in my folder.
What I want :
If a new file with specific name (not the complete name, but just a part of the name of the file) with a specific .pdf extension is detected in the directory,
Then, move this file in another directory
And send an email using postfix, including the name of this new file, without the complete path of the file
Any help with this will be good for me, since I am a beginner, I know have a lot to learn, and I am sure I will.
Thank you !

Maintain a session across multiple instances of app when called from same shell

I'm trying to have data (generated by an application only after its launch) persisted across multiple invocations of an application, but only when they're started from the same shell session.
One possible way to do that would be to pass the data back from the application to the calling shell, but since environment variable changes are only passed from parent to child, I don't know how to implement that.
Practical example:
There is job command that create subdirectory with current datetime and does work inside. Sometimes job needs to be killed and restarted, so it need directory where if finished, like job --resume 21Fri_1849/data. I would like to save 21Jan_1849/data so I don't have to check and type it each time I need to resume job. If I created something like .last_job, and wanted to restart job in another session, it could resume wrong (last) job, so files are not solution (AFAIK).
How can this be done?
Since you're only trying to target Linux, there are a fair number of tricks available here. Consider this one:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
current_boot_id=$(</proc/sys/kernel/random/boot_id)
# honor myprog_shell_pid if set and valid, fall back to PPID otherwise
if [[ $myprog_shell_pid ]] && [[ -e /proc/$myprog_shell_pid/stat ]]; then
parent_pid=$myprog_shell_pid
else
parent_pid=$PPID
fi
parent_start_time=$(awk '{print $22}' "/proc/$parent_pid/stat")
mkdir -p "$HOME/.cache/myscript-sessions"
data=$HOME/.cache/myscript-sessions/${current_boot_id}:${parent_pid}:${parent_start_time}
Now, we have a data file name that changes:
When we're rebooted (because current_boot_id is updated)
If we're run from a different shell (because our PPID changes).
If we're run from a different shell with the same PID (because the start time for the parent PID will be different).
...and you can easily delete files with the wrong boot id (because the system rebooted), or with names that refer to PID/start-time combinations that don't exist.
One caveat is that by default, this is sensitive to being called by subshells (output=$(./yourprog) will have a different PPID than ./yourprog will), but if the parent shell runs export myprog_shell_pid=$$, that issue goes away.
You're crossing over to where you need a simple job management engine instead of just shell. Using 'make' and writing Makefiles is the probably the simplest way to set this up. You can write a rule that tells how to turn a stage 1 file into a stage 2 file based on file extension, and then make will know how far things got and how to resume next time you run it.

how to get the filename along with absolute path to the file, whenever a new file is created using inode in linux?

I doing some experiments with my linux OS (CentOS) and I want to track all the tool logs created under the same environment, tool generates the respective logs (.log extn) for tracking these changes I wrote a perl watcher which actually monitoring the directory that I set and when the new file is created it will show at the output but This is consuming a lot of memory and CPU utilization as i have set 2sec as the sleep period.
My QUESTION "Is there any better of way doing this ?" I thought of using inode table for tracking all the changes in the system. can this solve my issue ? and if yes then could please let us know the solution towards the same ?
It seems that you want to monitor a directory for changes. This is a complex job, but for which there are good modules. The easiest one to recommend is probably Linux::Inotify2
This module implements an interface to the Linux 2.6.13 and later Inotify file/directory change notification system.
This seems to be along the lines of what you wanted.
Any such monitor needs additional event handling. This example uses AnyEvent.
use warnings;
use strict;
use feature 'say';
use AnyEvent;
use Linux::Inotify2;
my $dir = 'dir_to_watch';
my $inotify = Linux::Inotify2->new or die "Can't create inotify object: $!";
$inotify->watch( $dir, IN_MODIFY | IN_CREATE, sub {
my $e = shift;
my $name = $e->fullname;
say "$name modified" if $e->IN_MODIFY; # Both show the new file
say "$name created" if $e->IN_CREATE; # but see comments below
});
my $inotify_w = AnyEvent->io (
fh => $inotify->fileno, poll => 'r', cb => sub { $inotify->poll }
);
1 while $inotify->poll;
If you only care about new files then you only need one constant above.
For both types of events the $name has the name of the new file. From man inotify on my system
... the name field in the returned inotify_event structure identifies the name of the file within the directory.
The inotify_event structure is suitably represented by a Linux::Inotify2::Watcher object.
Using IN_CREATE seems to be an obvious solution for your purpose. I tested by creating two files, with two redirected echo commands separated by semi-colon on the same command line, and also by touch-ing a file. The written files are detected as separate events, and so is the touch-ed file.
Using IN_MODIFY may also work since it monitors (in $dir)
... any file system object in the watched object (always a directory), that is files, directories, symlinks, device nodes etc. ...
As for tests, both files written by echo as above are reported, as separate events. But a touch-ed file is not reported, since data didn't change (the file wasn't written to).
Which is better suited for your need depends on details. For example, a tool may open a log file as it starts, only to write to it much later. The two ways above will behave differently in that case. All this should be investigated carefully under your specific conditions.
We may think of a race condition, since while the code executes other file(s) could slip in. But the module is far better than that and it does report new changes after the handler completes. I tested by creating files while that code runs (and sleeps) and they are reported.
Some other notable frameworks for event-driven programming are POE and IO::Async.
The File::Monitor does this kind of work, too.

Unload a file from a ftp and rename it in host

I have one file delivered in a ftp daily. This file doesn´t have the same name everyday. It has the date and the hour of the creation. For example, today the file has the name 20130814_XX_YY_20130814152345, created at 15:23:45 and tomorrow the file can name 20130815_XX_YY_20130815152421. The _XX_YY_ is always the same but the hour will change everyday.
I want to create a host jcl that gets this file with variable name and rename it to a host file. How can I do this ?
Thank you
Regards
Chuchito
STEP1: You can use LS in FTP to write to disk, so you can have a file with the file-name in it. Then GET that file.
STEP2: Process the contents of your file to generate the FTP Control Cards (at least for the GET). The GET generated will be of the form GET 20130814_XX_YY_20130814152345 'HLQ.MAINFRAM.DATASET', where the server name has come from the file GETted in STEP1 and the local (Mainframe) file can be hard-coded, or supplied to the generation if flexibility is required.
STEP3: Run FTP again with the Control Card(s) generated.
Isn't there anything in the Spec?
Sometimes we create complexities where an "out of the box" solution simplifies life considerably.
After the post updated, I now understand the problem a bit better.
If the name is required to be so specific, then the other suggested solution (if i understand it) is to have a fixed file name on the server that contains a list of file names to be uploaded.
In fact, the server could create a fixed file name that is really the JCL to run on the mainframe!!! This file would include the //SYSIN DD * and GET commands! The mainframe uploads this file and submits it as-is to the job reader, which then runs on the mainframe. The last step of this job (created by the server, but run on the mainframe) is to FTP an empty JCL file back to the server, in this way the server "knows" that the mainframe has uploaded the files.
Alternatively, why does the non-Z\os system need to name the file with time information? If the mainframe processes the file daily then date should be sufficient.
With this change the mainframe can reliably predict the file name for the day, generate the appropriate GET command and run.
With a job scheduler it would be easy to run the upload to the mainframe twice a day. This might address any concerns that are expressed in the desire to include a time in the file's name.
Run a Rexx step via a Background TSO step:
Background TSO step
You can then run a listcat to get all the files. You could either write the listcat output to a file and read it in or trap the output via the Address command
or the OutTrap function.
Then use the standard TSO Rename command.
Alternatively you could run ISPF background rexx program and use the ISPF equivalents to get the file name
(1) The real solution to this should be through a scheduling tool for Mainframe jobs. These tools provide capabilities to take care of formatting like the one you described.
(2) Alternatives: REXX and COBOL
(3) If you don't want to prefer REXX, here's a little brief into how you could create the JCL dynamically using COBOL:
A COBOL program that would read a "template" JCL.
Using INSPECT / REPLACE, you could substitute the prototypes with the string that is populated with the date of your choice (you could supply this as a simple SYSIN parm too, if you want the COBOL code to be flexible on the date selection)
Now that your formatted JCL is ready, you could write it to the output stream
//OUTFILE DD SYSOUT=(INTRDR,)
or
//OUTFILE DD SYSOUT=(,INTRDR)
Anything that is written to INTRDR (Internal Reader), goes straight to JES to submit your job!
Hope this helps.

executing script file from azure blob and write its results to file

I'll explain the task requested from me:
I have two containers in Azure, one called "data" and one called "script". In the "data" container there's a txt file with data, and in the "script" container there's a script file.
Now, I need programatically (with WorkerRole) to execute the script file, with the content of the data file as parameters (Example: a script file that accepts a string 's' and returns to the screen "Hello, 's'", when 's' in the string given, and in the data file there's a string), and save the result of the run into another file which needs to be saved in another container called "result".
How do I do all these? I've already uploaded the files and created the blobs programatically, but I can't seem to understand how to execute the file of how to save its result to another file?
Can I please have some help?
Thanks in advance
Here are the steps in pseudo code:
Retrieve the script from the blob(using DownloadToStream())
Compile the script(I will leave this to you as I have no idea what
format your script is)
Load parameters from blob(same as step 1)
Execute script with those parameters.
If your script's can be written as lambda expressions then this becomes a lot easier as you can turn them into Action's
Edit based on your questiions:
DownloadText() is no longer included in Azure Storage 2.0, you only have access to DownloadToStream(). Even if you are using an older version(say 1.7) I would recommend using DownloadToStream() in the event you ever upgrade in the future. This will prevent having to refactor your code.
In terms of executing your script, depending on what type of script it is(if it is c# code you can use this example: Is it possible to dynamically compile and execute C# code fragments?. If you need to execute a different type of script you would need to run it using Process.Start and you can look at this example: http://www.dotnetperls.com/process-start
I do not have much experience with point number 2 but those are the processes I have heard and seen used.

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