generate fixed sequence for a given seed in linux - linux

I want to generate fixed a sequence of numbers that change with "seed" in linux. I am doing it with the following command.
export USR_SEED=91; export SEQ_START=53; export SEQ_LENGTH=15; bash -c 'RANDOM=$USR_SEED; for((i=1;i<=$SEQ_START;i++)); do echo -n $RANDOM >/dev/null; done; for((i=1;i<=$SEQ_LENGTH;i++)); do echo -n "$RANDOM "; done; echo'
This give a fixed sequence every-time I ran it, but the sequence changes when I do it on a different machine. Is there a way to generate a fixed sequence of numbers every-time I ran it, irrespective of machine (64bit, 32-bit linux platform).
-Mohan

I tried it on a few linux machines running:
3.8.0-23-generic, ubuntu, x86_64, bash version 4.2.45(1)-release
2.6.32-5-686, debian, i686, bash version 4.1.5(1)-release
2.6.32-5-amd64, debian, x86_64, bash version 4.2.37(1)-release
in each case if I used the same seed I had the same results.
Check to see if you're running different bash versions or if anything else strange might be interfering with your results. It should work exactly as you said.

Related

Shell "set" command in Linux and MacOS

I have stumbled upon this small difference between the set implementation of the 2 operating systems.
When running:
#!/bin/sh
set -eu
echo "${#}"
Running this on MacOS gives the following error:
#: unbound variable
Whereas running this in a Linux environment, results no errors, but echos an empty string.
Can this be resolved somehow, except changing ${#} to ${#:-} as this may result different results, if the amount of arguments is checked within the code.
The shell you have on Linux conforms to the latest POSIX standard while the one on MacOS does not (see spec., scroll downwards for -u; related: #0000155), hence the difference in behavior. A workaround would be:
#!/bin/sh
set -eu
echo "${1+"$#"}"
As you have an old version of bash on macos, you have to use "$#"
You can check the version with :
/bin/sh --version

Bash: Unexpected parallel behavior when reading arguments from file using xargs

Previous
This is a follow-up to this question.
Specs
My system is a dedicated server running Ubuntu Desktop, Release 12.04 (precise) 64-bit, 3.14.32-xxxx-std-ipv6-64. Neither release or kernel can be upgraded, but I can install any package.
Problem
The problem discribed in the question above seems to be solved, however this doesn't work for me. I've installed the latest lftp and parallel packages and they seem to work fine for themselves.
Running lftp works fine.
Running ./job.sh ftp.microsoft.com works fine, but I needed to chmod -x the script
Running sed 's/|.*$//' end_unique.txt | xargs parallel -j20 ./job.sh ::: does not work and produces bash errors in the form of /bin/bash: <server>: command not found.
To simplify things, I cleaned the input file end_unique.txt, now it has the following format for each line:
<server>
Each line ends in a CRLF, because it is imported from a windows server.
Edit 1:
This is the job.sh script:
#/bin/sh
server="$1"
lftp -e "find .; exit" "$server" >"$server-files.txt"
Edit 2:
I took the file and ran it against fromdos. Now it should be standard unix format, one server per line. Keep in mind that the server in the file can vary in format:
ftp.server.com
www.server.com
server.com
123.456.789.190
etc. All of those servers are ftp servers, accessible by ftp://<serverfromfile>/.
With :::, parallel expects the list of arguments it needs to complete the commands it's going to run to appear on the command line, as in
parallel -j20 ./job.sh ::: server1 server2 server3
Without ::: it reads the arguments from stdin, which serves us better in this case. You can simply say
parallel -j20 ./job.sh < end_unique.txt
Addendum: Things that can go wrong
Make certain two things:
That you are using GNU parallel and not another version (such as the one from moreutils), because only (as far as I'm aware) the GNU version supports reading an argument list from stdin, and
That GNU parallel is not configured to disable the GNU extensions. It turned out, after a lengthy discussion in the comments, that they are disabled by default on Ubuntu 12.04, so it is not inconceivable that this sort of thing might be found elsewhere (particularly downstream from Ubuntu). Such a configuration can hide in
The environment variable $PARALLEL,
/etc/parallel/config, or
~/.parallel/config
If the GNU version of parallel is not available to you, and if your argument list is not too long for the shell and none of the arguments in it contain whitespaces, the same thing with the moreutils parallel is
parallel -j20 job.sh -- $(cat end_unique.txt)
This did not work for OP because the file contained more servers than the shell was willing to put into a command line, but it might work for others with similar problems.

Color termcaps Konsole?

I've got a problem with ANSI escape codes in my terminal on OpenSuse 13.2.
My Makefile use to display pretty colors on OSX at work but at home when I use it I get the litteral termcaps such as \033[1;30m ... \033[0m
I know close to nothing about termcaps, I just found these escape characters that seemed to be working fine ! The strangest is that both my OSX and Linux terminal are configured with TERM=xterm-256color so I really don't know where to look for the correct setting I'm currently missing on Linux.
TL;DR: How to get escape codes such as \033[1;30m working in Konsole with xterm-256color ?
Edit: Here's a snippet of the Makefile I am talking about:
\Here's a snippet of the Makefile I am talking about:
# Display settings
RED_L = \033[1;31m
GREEN_L = \033[1;32m
GREEN = \033[0;32m
BLUE = \033[0;34m
RED = \033[0;31m
all: $(OBJ_DIR) $(NAME)
$(OBJ_DIR):
#mkdir -p $(OBJ_DIR)
$(NAME): $(OBJ)
#echo "$(BLUE)Linking binary $(RED)$(NAME)$(BLUE).\n"
#$(CC) -o $# $^ $(LFLAGS)
#echo "\t✻ $(GRAY)$(CC) -o $(RED)$(NAME)$(GRAY) object files:$(GREEN) OK! √\n$(NC)
The example which you gave does not rely upon the setting of TERM (unless it is going someplace other than the terminal, e.g., via some program which interprets it such as the ls program, which has its own notion about colors). It would help if you quoted the section of the makefile which uses the escape sequences. Without that, we can offer only generic advice, e.g,. by assuming you have an echo command in the makefile.
The place to start looking is at the shell which your makefile uses. One would expect bash to be the default shell on OpenSUSE. But suppose you are actually using some other shell which happens to not recognize the syntax you are using, and trying to do something like
echo '\033[1;34mhello\033[m'
To help ensure that you are using the expected shell, you can put an assignment in your makefile, e.g.,
SHELL = /bin/sh
This assumes that /bin/sh itself is going to work as intended. However, that is commonly a symbolic link (for Linux) to the real shell. If so, one possible solution would be to change the real shell using OpenSUSE's update-alternatives feature to change the shell to bash (or zsh).
For additional information, see the discussion of SHELL in the GNU make manual.
Reflecting comments on the version of make -- GNU make 4.0 is known to have incompatible changes versus 3.81, as noted in the thread GNU Make 4.0 released on LWN.net. In particular, there are several comments relating to your problem, starting here.
However, checking a recent Fedora, it seems that the problem really is that the default behavior for echo has changed. As noted in other discussions (such as Why doesn't echo support “\e” (escape) when using the -e argument in MacOSX), this was done to improve POSIX compatibility. You can get your colors back by adding a -e option to the echo commands.
I finally found the solution:
the problem was I used echo instead of echo -e which seems to be the default behaivour on Mac OSX.
Thanks for your help though, it lead me to good lectures :)

REDUX: How to overcome an incompatibility between the ksh on Linux vs. that installed on AIX/Solaris/HPUX?

I have uncovered another problem in the effort that we are making to port several hundreds of ksh scripts from AIX, Solaris and HPUX to Linux. See here for the previous problem.
This code:
#!/bin/ksh
if [ -a k* ]; then
echo "Oh yeah!"
else
echo "No way!"
fi
exit 0
(when run in a directory with several files whose name starts with k) produces "Oh yeah!" when called with the AT&T ksh variants (ksh88 and ksh93). On the other hand it produces and error message followed by "No way!" on the other ksh variants (pdksh, MKS ksh and bash).
Again, my question are:
Is there an environment variable that will cause pdksh to behave like ksh93? Failing that:
Is there an option on pdksh to get the required behavior?
I wouldn't use pdksh on Linux anymore.
Since AT&T ksh has become OpenSource there are packages available from the various Linux distributions. E.g. RedHat Enterprise Linux and CentOS include ksh93 as the "ksh" RPM package.
pdksh is still mentioned in many installation requirement documentations from software vendors. We replaced pdksh on all our Linux systems with ksh93 with no problems so far.
Well after one year there seems to be no solution to my problem.
I am adding this answer to say that I will have to live with it......
in Bash the test -a operation is for a single file.
I'm guessing that in Ksh88 the test -a operation is for a single file, but doesn't complain because the other test words are an unspecified condition to the -a.
you want something like
for K in /etc/rc2.d/K* ; do test -a $K && echo heck-yea ; done
I can say that ksh93 works just like bash in this regard.
Regrettably I think the code was written poorly, my opinion, and likely a bad opinion since the root cause of the problem is the ksh88 built-in test allowing for sloppy code.
You do realize that [ is an alias (often a link, symbolic or hard) for /usr/bin/test, right? So perhaps the actual problem is different versions of /usr/bin/test ?
OTOH, ksh overrides it with a builtin. Maybe there's a way to get it to not do that? or maybe you can explicitly alias [ to /usr/bin/test, if /usr/bin/test on all platforms is compatible?

How to overcome an incompatibility between the ksh on Linux vs. that installed on AIX/Solaris/HPUX?

I am involved in the process of porting a system containing several hundreds of ksh scripts from AIX, Solaris and HPUX to Linux. I have come across the following difference in the way ksh behaves on the two systems:
#!/bin/ksh
flag=false
echo "a\nb" | while read x
do
flag=true
done
echo "flag = ${flag}"
exit 0
On AIX, Solaris and HPUX the output is "flag = true" on Linux the output is "flag = false".
My questions are:
Is there an environment variable that I can set to get Linux's ksh to behave like the
other Os's'? Failing that:
Is there an option on Linux's ksh to get the required behavior? Failing that:
Is there a ksh implementation available for Linux with the desired behavior?
Other notes:
On AIX, Solaris and HPUX ksh is a variant of ksh88.
On Linux, ksh is the public domain ksh (pdksh)
On AIX, Solaris and HPUX dtksh and ksh93 (where I have them installed) are consistent with ksh
The Windows NT systems I have access to: Cygwin and MKS NT, are consistent with Linux.
On AIX, Solaris and Linux, bash is consistent, giving the incorrect (from my perspective) result of "flag = false".
The following table summarizes the systems the problem:
uname -s uname -r which ksh ksh version flag =
======== ======== ========= =========== ======
Linux 2.6.9-55.0.0.0.2.ELsmp /bin/ksh PD KSH v5.2.14 99/07/13.2 false
AIX 3 /bin/ksh Version M-11/16/88f true // AIX 5.3
/bin/ksh93 Version M-12/28/93e true
SunOS 5.8, 5.9 and 5.10 /bin/ksh Version M-11/16/88i true
/usr/dt/bin/dtksh Version M-12/28/93d true
HP-UX B.11.11 and B.11.23 /bin/ksh Version 11/16/88 true
/usr/dt/bin/dtksh Version M-12/28/93d true
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) /bin/ksh PD KSH v5.2.14 99/07/13.2 false
Windows_NT 5 .../mksnt/ksh.exe Version 8.7.0 build 1859... false // MKS
Update
After some advice from people in my company we decided to make the following modification to the code. This gives us the same result whether using the "real" ksh's (ksh88, ksh93) or any of the ksh clones (pdksh, MSK ksh). This also works correctly with bash.
#!/bin/ksh
echo "a\nb" > junk
flag=false
while read x
do
flag=true
done < junk
echo "flag = ${flag}"
exit 0
Thanks to jj33 for the previously accepted answer.
Instead of using pdksh on linux, use the "real" ksh from kornshell.org. pdksh is a blind re-implementation of ksh. kornshell.org is the original korn shell dating back 25 years or so (the one written by David Korn). AIX and Solaris use versions of the original ksh, so the kornshell.org version is usually feature- and bug- complete. Having cut my teeth with SunOS/Solaris, installing kornshell.org ksh is usually one of the first things I do on a new Linux box...
After some advice from people in my company we decided to make the following modification to the code. This gives us the same result whether using the "real" ksh's (ksh88, ksh93) or any of the ksh clones (pdksh, MSK ksh). This also works correctly with bash.
#!/bin/ksh
echo "a\nb" > junk
flag=false
while read x
do
flag=true
done < junk
echo "flag = ${flag}"
exit 0
Thanks to jj33 for the previous accepted answer.
I installed 'ksh' and 'pdksh' on my local Ubuntu Hardy system.
ii ksh 93s+20071105-1 The real, AT&T version of the Korn shell
ii pdksh 5.2.14-21ubunt A public domain version of the Korn shell
ksh has the "correct" behavior that you're expecting while pdksh does not. You might check your local Linux distribution's software repository for a "real" ksh, instead of using pdksh. The "Real Unix" OS's are going to install the AT&T version of Korn shell, rather than pdksh, by default, what with them being based off AT&T Unix (System V) :-).
Do you have to stay within ksh?
Even if you use the same ksh you'll still call all kinds of external commands (grep, ps, cat, etc...) part of them will have different parameters and different output from system to system. Either you'll have to take in account those differences or use the GNU version of each one of them to make things the same.
The Perl programming language originally was designed exactly to overcome this problem.
It includes all the features a unix shell programmer would want from he shell program but
it is the same on every Unix system. You might not have the latest version on all those
systems, but if you need to install something, maybe it is better to install perl.
The reason for the differences is whether the inside block is executed in the original shell context or in a subshell. You may be able to control this with the () and {} grouping commands. Using a temporary file, as you do in your update, will work most of the time but will run into problems if the script is run twice rapidly, or if it executes without clearing the file, etc.
#!/bin/ksh
flag=false
echo "a\nb" | { while read x
do
flag=true
done }
echo "flag = ${flag}"
exit 0
That may help with the problem you were getting on the Linux ksh. If you use parentheses instead of braces, you'll get the Linux behavior on the other ksh implementations.
Here is the another solution for echo "\n" issue
Steps:
Find ksh package name
$ rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}(%{ARCH})\n" | grep "ksh"
ksh-20100621-19.el6_4.3(x86_64)
uninstall ksh
$ sudo yum remove ksh-20100621-19.el6_4.3.x86_64
down load pdksh-5.2.14-37.el5_8.1.x86_64.rpm (Please check OS for 32-bit or 64-bit and choose correct pkg)
Install pdksh-5.2.14-37.el5_8.1.x86_64.rpm
$ sudo yum -y install /SCRIPT_PATH/pdksh-5.2.14-37.el5_8.1.x86_64.rpm
Output before PDKSH install
$ ora_db_start_stop.sh
\n==============
Usage: START
==============\n\n
./ora_db_start_stop.sh START ALL \n
OR \n
./ora_db_start_stop.sh START ONE_OR_MORE \n
\n==============
Usage: STOP
==============\n\n
./ora_db_start_stop.sh STOP ALL \n
OR \n
./ora_db_start_stop.sh STOP ONE_OR_MORE \n\n
After PDKSH install
==============
Usage: START
./ora_db_start_stop.sh START ALL
OR
./ora_db_start_stop.sh START ONE_OR_MORE
==============
Usage: STOP
./ora_db_start_stop.sh STOP ALL
OR
./ora_db_start_stop.sh STOP ONE_OR_MORE
I don't know of any particular option to force ksh to be compatible with a particular older version. That said, perhaps you could install a very old version of ksh on your linux box, and have it behave in a compatible manner?
It might be easier to install a more modern version of amy shell on the AIX/HP-UX boxes, and just migrate your scripts to use sh. I know there are versions of bash available for all platforms.
Your script gives the correct (true) output when zsh is used with the emulate -L ksh option. If all else fails you may wish to try using zsh on Linux.

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