Running ssh script with background process - unix

Below is a simple example of what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm trying to force an ssh script to not wait for all child processes to exit before returning. The purpose is to launch a daemon process on a remote host via ssh.
test.sh
#!/bin/bash
(
sleep 2
echo "done"
) &
When I run the script on the console it returns immediately, with "done" appearing 2 seconds later.
When I run the script as an ssh script, the ssh command . It appears to wait until all child processes have terminated until ssh exits.
ssh example
$ ssh mike#127.0.0.1 /home/mike/test.sh
(2 seconds)
done
standard terminal example
$ ./test.sh
$
(2 seconds)
done
How can I make ssh return when the parent/main process has terminated?
EDIT:
I'm aware of the -f option to ssh to run the process in the background . It leaves the ssh process and connection open on the source host. For my purposes this is unsuitable.

ssh mike#127.0.0.1 /home/mike/test.sh
When you run ssh in this fashion, the remote ssh server will create a set of pipes (or socketpairs) which become the standard input, output, and error for the process which you requested it to run, in this case the script process. The ssh server doesn't end the session based on when the script process exits. Instead, it ends the session when it reads and end-of-file indication on the script process's standard output and standard error.
In your case, the script process creates a child process which inherits the script's standard input, output, and error. A pipe (or socketpair) only returns EOF when all possible writers have exited or closed their end of the pipe. As long as the child process is running and has a copy of the standard output/error file descriptors, the ssh server won't read an EOF indication on those descriptors and it won't close the session.
You can get around this by redirecting standard input and standard output in the command that you pass to the remote server:
ssh mike#127.0.0.1 '/home/mike/test.sh > /dev/null 2>&1'
(note the quotes are important)
This avoids passing the standard output and standard error created by the ssh server to the script process or the subprocesses that it creates.
Alternately, you could add a redirection to the script:
#!/bin/bash
(
exec > /dev/null 2>&1
sleep 2
echo "done"
) &
This causes the script's child process to close its copies of the original standard output and standard error.

Related

paramiko and nohup ''

OK so I have paramiko v2.2.1 and I am trying to login to a machine and restart a service. Inside the service scripts it basically starts a process via nohup. However if I allow paramiko to disconnect as soon as it is done the process started terminates with a PIPE signal when it writes to stdout.
If I start the service by ssh'ing into the box and manually starting it there is no issue and it runs in the background fine. Also if I add long sleep 10 before disconnecting (close) paramiko it also seems to work just fine.
The service is started via a init.d script via a line like this:
env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$bin_path nohup $bin_path/ServerLoop.sh \
"$bin_path/Service service args" "$#" &
Where ServerLoop.sh simply calls the service forever in a loop like this so it will never die:
SERVER=$1
shift
ARGS=$#
logger $ARGS
while [ 1 ]; do
$SERVER $ARGS
logger "$SERVER terminated with exit code: $STATUS. Server has been restarted"
sleep 1
done
I have noticed when I start the service by ssh'ing into the box I get a nohup.out file written to the root. However when I run through paramiko I get no nohup.out written anywhere on the system ... ie this after I manually ssh into the box and start the service:
root#ts4700:/mnt/mc.fw/bin# find / -name "nohup*"
/usr/bin/nohup
/usr/share/man/man1/nohup.1.gz
/nohup.out
And this is after I run through paramiko:
root#ts4700:/mnt/mc.fw/bin# find / -name "nohup*"
/usr/bin/nohup
/usr/share/man/man1/nohup.1.gz
As I understand it nohup will only redirect the output to nohup.out if "If standard output is a terminal" (from the manual), otherwise it thinks it is saving the output to a file so it does not redirect. Hence I tried the following:
In [43]: import paramiko
In [44]: paramiko.__version__
Out[44]: '2.2.1'
In [45]: ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
In [46]: ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(AutoAddPolicy())
In [47]: ssh.connect(ip, username='root', password=not_for_so_sorry, look_for_keys=False, allow_agent=False)
In [48]: stdin, stdout, stderr = ssh.exec_command("tty")
In [49]: stdout.read()
Out[49]: 'not a tty\n'
So I am thinking that nohup is not redirecting to nohup.out when I run it through paramiko because tty is not returning a terminal. I don't know why adding a sleep(10) would fix this though as the service if run on the command line is quite verbose.
I have also noticed that if the service is started from a manual ssh its tty in the ps ax output is still set to the ssh tty ... however if the process is started by paramiko its tty in the ps ax output is set to "?" .. since both processes are run through nohup I would have expected this to be the same.
If the problem is that nohup is indeed not redirecting the output to nohup.out because of the tty is there a way to force this to happen or a better way to run this sort of command via paramiko?
Thanks all, any help with this would be great :)

How do you stop the current foreground process and re-execute it?

I often have to relaunch a server to see if my changes are fine. I keep this server opened in a shell, so I have a quick access to current logs. So here is what I type in my shell: ^C!!⏎. That is send SIGINT, and then relaunch last event in history.
So what I would like is to type, say ^R, and have the same result.
(Note: I use zsh)
I tried the following:
relaunch-function() {
kill -INT %% && !!
}
zle -N relaunch-widget relaunch-function
bindkey "^R" relaunch-widget
But it seems that while running my server, ^R won't be passed tho the shell but to the server which doesn't notice the shell. So I can't see a generic solution, while testing return value and process name should be feasible.
As long as the job is running in the foreground, keys will not be passed to the shell. So setting a key binding for killing a foreground process and starting it again won't work.
But as you could start your server in an endless loop, so that it restarts automatically. Assuming the name of the command is run_server you can start it like this on the shell:
(TRAPINT(){};while sleep .5; do run_server; done)
The surrounding parentheses start a sub-shell, TRAPINT(){} disables SIGINT for this shell. The while loop will keep restarting run_server until sleep exits with an exit status that is not zero. That can be achieved by interrupting sleep with ^C. (Without setting TRAPINT, interrupting run_server could also interrupt the loop)
So if you want to restart your server, just press ^C and wait for 0.5 seconds. If you want to stop your server without restarting, press ^C twice in 0.5 seconds.
To save some typing you can create a function for that:
doloop() {(
TRAPINT(){}
while sleep .5
do
echo running \"$#\"
eval $#
done
)}
Then call it with doloop run_server. Note: You still need the additional surrounding () as functions do not open a sub-shell by themselves.
eval allows for shell constructs to be used. For example doloop LANG=C locale. In some cases you may need to use (single):
$ doloop echo $RANDOM
running "echo 242"
242
running "echo 242"
242
running "echo 242"
242
^C
$ doloop 'echo $RANDOM'
running "echo $RANDOM"
10988
running "echo $RANDOM"
27551
running "echo $RANDOM"
8910
^C

nohup - dont want nohup.out but want log going to a different file on the remote server

I'm running the following command (where variables have valid values for ssh command and $file - is a .sql file).
nohup ssh -qn ${ssh_user}#${dbs} "sqlplus $dbuser/${dbpswd}#${dbname} <<ENDSQL | tee "${sql_run_output_file}".ssh.log
set echo off
set echo on
set timing on
set time on
set serveroutput on size 1000000
#${file}
ENDSQL
"
When I was using the above command without "nohup" before ssh command, after 1 hour or so, my connection from source server (where im running ssh) was getting an error/message "Connection reset...." and hanging my BASH shell script (which contains this ssh command in it). When, I use nohup, i dont see the connection issue.
Here's what I'm trying to get and need your help.
Change the command shown above so that the command will NOT create a nohup.out
(Did I read that I can use > instead of | tee ... and use 2>&1)
I DO NOT want to run the command giving a "&" (background)
I DO want a LOG file for the sqlplus session that's running on the target DB server via ssh command/connection (initiated from source server).
Thanks.
You can still lose the connection when running ssh under nohup, so it's not really a good solution. If possible, I would recommend that you copy the sql file via scp to the target server, then ssh in to the server, open a screen and run the command from there (Or run it under nohup). Is that an option?

How do I use the nohup command without getting nohup.out?

I have a problem with the nohup command.
When I run my job, I have a lot of data. The output nohup.out becomes too large and my process slows down. How can I run this command without getting nohup.out?
The nohup command only writes to nohup.out if the output would otherwise go to the terminal. If you have redirected the output of the command somewhere else - including /dev/null - that's where it goes instead.
nohup command >/dev/null 2>&1 # doesn't create nohup.out
Note that the >/dev/null 2>&1 sequence can be abbreviated to just >&/dev/null in most (but not all) shells.
If you're using nohup, that probably means you want to run the command in the background by putting another & on the end of the whole thing:
nohup command >/dev/null 2>&1 & # runs in background, still doesn't create nohup.out
On Linux, running a job with nohup automatically closes its input as well. On other systems, notably BSD and macOS, that is not the case, so when running in the background, you might want to close input manually. While closing input has no effect on the creation or not of nohup.out, it avoids another problem: if a background process tries to read anything from standard input, it will pause, waiting for you to bring it back to the foreground and type something. So the extra-safe version looks like this:
nohup command </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 & # completely detached from terminal
Note, however, that this does not prevent the command from accessing the terminal directly, nor does it remove it from your shell's process group. If you want to do the latter, and you are running bash, ksh, or zsh, you can do so by running disown with no argument as the next command. That will mean the background process is no longer associated with a shell "job" and will not have any signals forwarded to it from the shell. (A disowned process gets no signals forwarded to it automatically by its parent shell - but without nohup, it will still receive a HUP signal sent via other means, such as a manual kill command. A nohup'ed process ignores any and all HUP signals, no matter how they are sent.)
Explanation:
In Unixy systems, every source of input or target of output has a number associated with it called a "file descriptor", or "fd" for short. Every running program ("process") has its own set of these, and when a new process starts up it has three of them already open: "standard input", which is fd 0, is open for the process to read from, while "standard output" (fd 1) and "standard error" (fd 2) are open for it to write to. If you just run a command in a terminal window, then by default, anything you type goes to its standard input, while both its standard output and standard error get sent to that window.
But you can ask the shell to change where any or all of those file descriptors point before launching the command; that's what the redirection (<, <<, >, >>) and pipe (|) operators do.
The pipe is the simplest of these... command1 | command2 arranges for the standard output of command1 to feed directly into the standard input of command2. This is a very handy arrangement that has led to a particular design pattern in UNIX tools (and explains the existence of standard error, which allows a program to send messages to the user even though its output is going into the next program in the pipeline). But you can only pipe standard output to standard input; you can't send any other file descriptors to a pipe without some juggling.
The redirection operators are friendlier in that they let you specify which file descriptor to redirect. So 0<infile reads standard input from the file named infile, while 2>>logfile appends standard error to the end of the file named logfile. If you don't specify a number, then input redirection defaults to fd 0 (< is the same as 0<), while output redirection defaults to fd 1 (> is the same as 1>).
Also, you can combine file descriptors together: 2>&1 means "send standard error wherever standard output is going". That means that you get a single stream of output that includes both standard out and standard error intermixed with no way to separate them anymore, but it also means that you can include standard error in a pipe.
So the sequence >/dev/null 2>&1 means "send standard output to /dev/null" (which is a special device that just throws away whatever you write to it) "and then send standard error to wherever standard output is going" (which we just made sure was /dev/null). Basically, "throw away whatever this command writes to either file descriptor".
When nohup detects that neither its standard error nor output is attached to a terminal, it doesn't bother to create nohup.out, but assumes that the output is already redirected where the user wants it to go.
The /dev/null device works for input, too; if you run a command with </dev/null, then any attempt by that command to read from standard input will instantly encounter end-of-file. Note that the merge syntax won't have the same effect here; it only works to point a file descriptor to another one that's open in the same direction (input or output). The shell will let you do >/dev/null <&1, but that winds up creating a process with an input file descriptor open on an output stream, so instead of just hitting end-of-file, any read attempt will trigger a fatal "invalid file descriptor" error.
nohup some_command > /dev/null 2>&1&
That's all you need to do!
Have you tried redirecting all three I/O streams:
nohup ./yourprogram > foo.out 2> foo.err < /dev/null &
You might want to use the detach program. You use it like nohup but it doesn't produce an output log unless you tell it to. Here is the man page:
NAME
detach - run a command after detaching from the terminal
SYNOPSIS
detach [options] [--] command [args]
Forks a new process, detaches is from the terminal, and executes com‐
mand with the specified arguments.
OPTIONS
detach recognizes a couple of options, which are discussed below. The
special option -- is used to signal that the rest of the arguments are
the command and args to be passed to it.
-e file
Connect file to the standard error of the command.
-f Run in the foreground (do not fork).
-i file
Connect file to the standard input of the command.
-o file
Connect file to the standard output of the command.
-p file
Write the pid of the detached process to file.
EXAMPLE
detach xterm
Start an xterm that will not be closed when the current shell exits.
AUTHOR
detach was written by Robbert Haarman. See http://inglorion.net/ for
contact information.
Note I have no affiliation with the author of the program. I'm only a satisfied user of the program.
Following command will let you run something in the background without getting nohup.out:
nohup command |tee &
In this way, you will be able to get console output while running script on the remote server:
sudo bash -c "nohup /opt/viptel/viptel_bin/log.sh $* &> /dev/null" &
Redirecting the output of sudo causes sudo to reask for the password, thus an awkward mechanism is needed to do this variant.
If you have a BASH shell on your mac/linux in-front of you, you try out the below steps to understand the redirection practically :
Create a 2 line script called zz.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo "Hello. This is a proper command"
junk_errorcommand
The echo command's output goes into STDOUT filestream (file descriptor 1).
The error command's output goes into STDERR filestream (file descriptor 2)
Currently, simply executing the script sends both STDOUT and STDERR to the screen.
./zz.sh
Now start with the standard redirection :
zz.sh > zfile.txt
In the above, "echo" (STDOUT) goes into the zfile.txt. Whereas "error" (STDERR) is displayed on the screen.
The above is the same as :
zz.sh 1> zfile.txt
Now you can try the opposite, and redirect "error" STDERR into the file. The STDOUT from "echo" command goes to the screen.
zz.sh 2> zfile.txt
Combining the above two, you get:
zz.sh 1> zfile.txt 2>&1
Explanation:
FIRST, send STDOUT 1 to zfile.txt
THEN, send STDERR 2 to STDOUT 1 itself (by using &1 pointer).
Therefore, both 1 and 2 goes into the same file (zfile.txt)
Eventually, you can pack the whole thing inside nohup command & to run it in the background:
nohup zz.sh 1> zfile.txt 2>&1&
You can run the below command.
nohup <your command> & > <outputfile> 2>&1 &
e.g.
I have a nohup command inside script
./Runjob.sh > sparkConcuurent.out 2>&1

Forwarding signals to child processes

I have a shell script that starts an ssh session to a remote host and pipes the output to another, local script, like so:
#!/bin/sh
ssh user#host 'while true ; do get-info ; sleep 1 ; done' | awk -f parse-info.awk
It works fine. I run it under the 'supervise' program from djb's daemontools. The only problem is shutting down the daemon. If I terminate the process for this shell script, the ssh and awk processes continue running as orphans. Normally I would solve this problem with exec to replace the supervising shell process, but the two processes run in their own subshells and can't replace the shell process.
What I would like to do is have the supervising shell script 'forward' any signals it receives to at least one of the child processes, so that I can break the pipe and shut down cleanly. Is there an easy way to do this?
Inter process communications.
You should be looking at pipes, etc.

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