Running a command only once from a script, even script is executed multiple times - linux

I need some help. I'm having a script 'Script 1', which will call 'Script 2' to run in background which checks something periodically. But I want the Script 2 to get started only once, even Script 1 is called multiple times. Is there a way to do it?
It would be even more helpful, if someone suggests some commands to achieve this.
Thanks in advance

Sure, you can put something like this at the top of Script2:
if [[ -f /tmp/Script2HasRun ]] ; then
exit
fi
touch /tmp/Script2HasRun
That will stop Script2 from ever running again by using a sentinel file, unless the file is deleted of course, and it probably will be at some point since it's in /tmp.
So you probably want to put it somewhere else where it can be better protected.
If you don't want to stop it from ever running again, you need some mechanism to delete the sentinel file.
For example, if your intent is to only have one copy running at a time:
if [[ -f /tmp/Script2IsRunning ]] ; then
exit
fi
touch /tmp/Script2IsRunning
# Do whatever you have to do.
rm -f /tmp/Script2IsRunning
And keep in mind there's a race condition in there that could result in two copies running. There are ways to mitigate that as well by using the content as well as the existence, something like:
if [[ -f /tmp/Script2IsRunning ]] ; then
exit
fi
echo $$ >/tmp/Script2IsRunning
sleep 1
if [[ "$(cat /tmp/Script2IsRunning 2>/dev/null)" != $$ ]] ; then
exit
fi
# Do whatever you have to do.
rm -f /tmp/Script2IsRunning
There are more levels of protection beyond that but they become complex, and I usually find that suffices for most things.

Related

How to select a command among multiples with priority

I am trying to create a basic utility for which i need supervisord installed on machine. But the problem is that its depend on user, how he/she is installing it, so here i am trying to cover almost all scenario to get supervisord command.
Following is my code which i am using right now.
if [[ -f "/opt/anaconda/bin/supervisord" ]]; then
RUNNER="/opt/anaconda/bin/supervisord"
elif [[ -f "/usr/local/bin/supervisord" ]]; then
RUNNER="/usr/local/bin/supervisord"
elif [[ -f "/usr/bin/supervisord" ]]; then
RUNNER="/usr/bin/supervisord"
elif [[ "$(command -v supervisord)" ]]; then
RUNNER="supervisord"
else
echo "supervisord is not install on this machine"
exit 1
fi
I am looking any better approach to achieve this.
The posted code checks some absolute paths,
and when it finds one that exists,
it will use that.
This is not a good idea.
You can expect users to set their PATH in such a way that the correct version of supervisord will get used, wherever it is.
In other words, the command available on PATH must be the first choice.
if type supervisord &>/dev/null; then
RUNNER=supervisord
elif ...
...
fi

Linux Single Instance Kill if running too long

I am using the following to keep a single instance of a script running on my server. I have a cronjob to run this every minute.
How do I daemonize an arbitrary script in unix?
#!/bin/bash
if [[ $# < 1 ]]; then
echo "Name of pid file not given."
exit
fi
# Get the pid file's name.
PIDFILE=$1
shift
if [[ $# < 1 ]]; then
echo "No command given."
exit
fi
echo "Checking pid in file $PIDFILE."
#Check to see if process running.
PID=$(cat $PIDFILE 2>/dev/null)
if [[ $? = 0 ]]; then
ps -p $PID >/dev/null 2>&1
if [[ $? = 0 ]]; then
echo "Command $1 already running."
exit
fi
fi
# Write our pid to file.
echo $$ >$PIDFILE
# Get command.
COMMAND=$1
shift
# Run command
$COMMAND "$*"
Now I found out that my script had hung for some reason and therefore it was stuck. I'd like a way to check if the $PIDFILE is "old" and if so, kill the process. I know that's possible (check the timestamp on the file) but I don't know the syntax or if this is even a good idea. Also, when this script is running, the CPU should be pretty heavily used. If it hangs (rare but it happened at least once so far), the CPU usage drops to 0%. It would be nice if I could check that the process is really hung/not active, but I don't know if there's an easy way to do that (and I don't want to have many false positives where it gets killed but it's running fine).
To answer the question in your title, which seems quite different from your problem, use timeout.
Now, for your problem, I don't see where it could hang, unless you gave it a fifo queue for the pid file. Now, to run and respawn, you can just run this script once, on startup:
#!/bin/bash
while /bin/true; do
"$#"
wait
done
Which brings up another bug in the code you got from the other question: "$*" will pass all the arguments to the script as a single argument; without the quotes it'll split arguments with white space. "$#" will pass them individually and handling white space properly.
Call with /path/to/script command [argument]....

Script which removes itself after the first execution

I want to develop a shell script that remove itself at the end of the execution.
How can this be done?
Simply [[ -f "$0" ]] && rm "$0". Might want to protect from write failures and otherwise.

How to stock PID of lockfile command in Linux

I am using lockfile command in linux to manage access to a special file.
When my principal script crashes for some reason, i finish having hanging locks that prevent any new launch of the principal script and bother heavily its execution.
Is there a way to stock the PID of my lockfile processes so i can track them and make proper clean-up before relaunching my principal script.
Hope i was clear enough...
This is a fragile mechanism. I prefer to use real file locks, so when the process that owns them dies, the O/S will release the lock automatically. Easy to do in perl (using the flock function), but i don't know if it's possible in Bash.
More to the point, i suppose you could use the lockfile itself to hold the PID of the script holding the lock, right?
(I don't do shell scripting much... i think the code below is mostly right, but use at your own risk. There are race conditions.)
while [[ lockfile -! -r 0 lock.file ]]
do
kill -0 `cat lock.file`
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]
then
# process doesn't exist anymore
echo $$ >lock.file
# do something important
rm -f lock.file
break
fi
sleep 5
done
Or, how about this:
while [[ true ]]
do
if [[ ! -e pid.file ]]
then
echo $$ > pid.file
else
if [[ kill -0 `cat pid.file`]]
then
# owner process exists
sleep 30
else
# process gone, take ownership
echo $$ > pid.file
# ### DO SOMETHING IMPORTANT HERE ###
rm -f pid.file
break
fi
fi
done
I like the second one better. It's still far from perfect (lots of race conditions), but it might work if there aren't too many processes fighting for the lock. Also, the sleep 30 should include some randomness in it, if possible (the length of the sleep should have a random component).
But see here, it looks like you can use flock with some versions of the shell. This would be similar to what i do in perl, and it would be safer than the althernatives i can think of.

Using named pipes with bash - Problem with data loss

Did some search online, found simple 'tutorials' to use named pipes. However when I do anything with background jobs I seem to lose a lot of data.
[[Edit: found a much simpler solution, see reply to post. So the question I put forward is now academic - in case one might want a job server]]
Using Ubuntu 10.04 with Linux 2.6.32-25-generic #45-Ubuntu SMP Sat Oct 16 19:52:42 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
GNU bash, version 4.1.5(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu).
My bash function is:
function jqs
{
pipe=/tmp/__job_control_manager__
trap "rm -f $pipe; exit" EXIT SIGKILL
if [[ ! -p "$pipe" ]]; then
mkfifo "$pipe"
fi
while true
do
if read txt <"$pipe"
then
echo "$(date +'%Y'): new text is [[$txt]]"
if [[ "$txt" == 'quit' ]]
then
break
fi
fi
done
}
I run this in the background:
> jqs&
[1] 5336
And now I feed it:
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
do
(echo aaa$i > /tmp/__job_control_manager__ && echo success$i &)
done
The output is inconsistent.
I frequently don't get all success echoes.
I get at most as many new text echos as success echoes, sometimes less.
If I remove the '&' from the 'feed', it seems to work, but I am blocked until the output is read. Hence me wanting to let sub-processes get blocked, but not the main process.
The aim being to write a simple job control script so I can run say 10 jobs in parallel at most and queue the rest for later processing, but reliably know that they do run.
Full job manager below:
function jq_manage
{
export __gn__="$1"
pipe=/tmp/__job_control_manager_"$__gn__"__
trap "rm -f $pipe" EXIT
trap "break" SIGKILL
if [[ ! -p "$pipe" ]]; then
mkfifo "$pipe"
fi
while true
do
date
jobs
if (($(jobs | egrep "Running.*echo '%#_Group_#%_$__gn__'" | wc -l) < $__jN__))
then
echo "Waiting for new job"
if read new_job <"$pipe"
then
echo "new job is [[$new_job]]"
if [[ "$new_job" == 'quit' ]]
then
break
fi
echo "In group $__gn__, starting job $new_job"
eval "(echo '%#_Group_#%_$__gn__' > /dev/null; $new_job) &"
fi
else
sleep 3
fi
done
}
function jq
{
# __gn__ = first parameter to this function, the job group name (the pool within which to allocate __jN__ jobs)
# __jN__ = second parameter to this function, the maximum of job numbers to run concurrently
export __gn__="$1"
shift
export __jN__="$1"
shift
export __jq__=$(jobs | egrep "Running.*echo '%#_GroupQueue_#%_$__gn__'" | wc -l)
if (($__jq__ '<' 1))
then
eval "(echo '%#_GroupQueue_#%_$__gn__' > /dev/null; jq_manage $__gn__) &"
fi
pipe=/tmp/__job_control_manager_"$__gn__"__
echo $# >$pipe
}
Calling
jq <name> <max processes> <command>
jq abc 2 sleep 20
will start one process.
That part works fine. Start a second one, fine.
One by one by hand seem to work fine.
But starting 10 in a loop seems to lose the system, as in the simpler example above.
Any hints as to what I can do to solve this apparent loss of IPC data would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Alain.
Your problem is if statement below:
while true
do
if read txt <"$pipe"
....
done
What is happening is that your job queue server is opening and closing the pipe each time around the loop. This means that some of the clients are getting a "broken pipe" error when they try to write to the pipe - that is, the reader of the pipe goes away after the writer opens it.
To fix this, change your loop in the server open the pipe once for the entire loop:
while true
do
if read txt
....
done < "$pipe"
Done this way, the pipe is opened once and kept open.
You will need to be careful of what you run inside the loop, as all processing inside the loop will have stdin attached to the named pipe. You will want to make sure you redirect stdin of all your processes inside the loop from somewhere else, otherwise they may consume the data from the pipe.
Edit: With the problem now being that you are getting EOF on your reads when the last client closes the pipe, you can use jilles method of duping the file descriptors, or you can just make sure you are a client too and keep the write side of the pipe open:
while true
do
if read txt
....
done < "$pipe" 3> "$pipe"
This will hold the write side of the pipe open on fd 3. The same caveat applies with this file descriptor as with stdin. You will need to close it so any child processes dont inherit it. It probably matters less than with stdin, but it would be cleaner.
As said in other answers you need to keep the fifo open at all times to avoid losing data.
However, once all writers have left after the fifo has been open (so there was a writer), reads return immediately (and poll() returns POLLHUP). The only way to clear this state is to reopen the fifo.
POSIX does not provide a solution to this but at least Linux and FreeBSD do: if reads start failing, open the fifo again while keeping the original descriptor open. This works because in Linux and FreeBSD the "hangup" state is local to a particular open file description, while in POSIX it is global to the fifo.
This can be done in a shell script like this:
while :; do
exec 3<tmp/testfifo
exec 4<&-
while read x; do
echo "input: $x"
done <&3
exec 4<&3
exec 3<&-
done
Just for those that might be interested, [[re-edited]] following comments by camh and jilles, here are two new versions of the test server script.
Both versions now works exactly as hoped.
camh's version for pipe management:
function jqs # Job queue manager
{
pipe=/tmp/__job_control_manager__
trap "rm -f $pipe; exit" EXIT TERM
if [[ ! -p "$pipe" ]]; then
mkfifo "$pipe"
fi
while true
do
if read -u 3 txt
then
echo "$(date +'%Y'): new text is [[$txt]]"
if [[ "$txt" == 'quit' ]]
then
break
else
sleep 1
# process $txt - remember that if this is to be a spawned job, we should close fd 3 and 4 beforehand
fi
fi
done 3< "$pipe" 4> "$pipe" # 4 is just to keep the pipe opened so any real client does not end up causing read to return EOF
}
jille's version for pipe management:
function jqs # Job queue manager
{
pipe=/tmp/__job_control_manager__
trap "rm -f $pipe; exit" EXIT TERM
if [[ ! -p "$pipe" ]]; then
mkfifo "$pipe"
fi
exec 3< "$pipe"
exec 4<&-
while true
do
if read -u 3 txt
then
echo "$(date +'%Y'): new text is [[$txt]]"
if [[ "$txt" == 'quit' ]]
then
break
else
sleep 1
# process $txt - remember that if this is to be a spawned job, we should close fd 3 and 4 beforehand
fi
else
# Close the pipe and reconnect it so that the next read does not end up returning EOF
exec 4<&3
exec 3<&-
exec 3< "$pipe"
exec 4<&-
fi
done
}
Thanks to all for your help.
Like camh & Dennis Williamson say don't break the pipe.
Now I have smaller examples, direct on the command line:
Server:
(
for i in {0,1,2,3,4}{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9};
do
if read s;
then echo ">>$i--$s//";
else
echo "<<$i";
fi;
done < tst-fifo
)&
Client:
(
for i in {%a,#b}{1,2}{0,1};
do
echo "Test-$i" > tst-fifo;
done
)&
Can replace the key line with:
(echo "Test-$i" > tst-fifo&);
All client data sent to the pipe gets read, though with option two of the client one may need to start the server a couple of times before all data is read.
But although the read waits for data in the pipe to start with, once data has been pushed, it reads the empty string forever.
Any way to stop this?
Thanks for any insights again.
On the one hand the problem is worse than I thought:
Now there seems to be a case in my more complex example (jq_manage) where the same data is being read over and over again from the pipe (even though no new data is being written to it).
On the other hand, I found a simple solution (edited following Dennis' comment):
function jqn # compute the number of jobs running in that group
{
__jqty__=$(jobs | egrep "Running.*echo '%#_Group_#%_$__groupn__'" | wc -l)
}
function jq
{
__groupn__="$1"; shift # job group name (the pool within which to allocate $__jmax__ jobs)
__jmax__="$1"; shift # maximum of job numbers to run concurrently
jqn
while (($__jqty__ '>=' $__jmax__))
do
sleep 1
jqn
done
eval "(echo '%#_Group_#%_$__groupn__' > /dev/null; $#) &"
}
Works like a charm.
No socket or pipe involved.
Simple.
run say 10 jobs in parallel at most and queue the rest for later processing, but reliably know that they do run
You can do this with GNU Parallel. You will not need a this scripting.
http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html#options
You can set max-procs "Number of jobslots. Run up to N jobs in parallel." There is an option to set the number of CPU cores you want to use. You can save the list of executed jobs to a log file, but that is a beta feature.

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