I am hoping someone can help me figure out what setting I might need to overwrite. I am working on a Unix terminal server, running a Linux Xterm linux shell. Everytime I use a command like grep "blah" 2> /dev/null at the shell prompt, the command is run as grep "blah" 2 > /dev/null and needless to say the redirection fails.
xterm version is X.Org 6.8.99.903(238)
I can not update or install anything, this is a locked down production server.
Thanks for any help and illumination on the topic, it is making my grep useless at high directory levels with recursion.
That's Bourne shell syntax, and it doesn't work in c-shell.
The best you can do is
( command >stdout_file ) >&stderr_file
Where you get stdout to one file, and stderr to another. Redirecting just stderr is not possible.
In a comment, you say "A minor note, this is csh". That's not a minor note, that's the cause of the problem. xterm is just a terminal emulator, not a shell; all it does is set up a window that provides textual input and output. csh (or bash, or ...) is the shell, the program that interprets the commands you type.
csh has different syntax for redirection, and doesn't let you redirect just stderr. command > file redirects stdout; command >& file redirects both stdout and stderr.
You say the system doesn't have bash, but it does have ksh. I suggest just using ksh; it will be a lot more familiar to you. Both bash and ksh are derived from the old Bourne shell.
All (?) Unix-like systems will have a Bourne-like shell installed as /bin/sh. Even if you're using csh (or tcsh?) as your interactive shell, you can still invoke sh, even in a one-liner. For example:
sh -c 'command 2>/dev/null'
will invoke sh, which in turn will invoke command and redirect just its stderr to /dev/null.
The purpose of an interactive shell is (mostly) to let you use other commands that are available on the system. sh, or any shell, can be used as just another command.
I'm not following how the environment variable $NLSPATH value is being cleared/reset when running gmake. In my bash shell, if I issue echo $NLSPATH, I see the expected /usr/lib/nls/msg/%L/%N: (etc).
I then create a Makefile like this:
all:
echo $$NLSPATH
echo $$PATH
And running gmake all gives me
echo $NLSPATH
echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/etc:(etc as expected)
I also tried -e with the same result;
gmake -e all
echo $NLSPATH
echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/etc:(etc as expected)
I've looked at /etc/environment and /etc/.profile and $NLSPATH is set correctly there.
Also if I run the standard AIX make, the NLSPATH is shown as expected. So this seems to be gmake and/or the way it invokes the current shell.
Could someone suggest where I should be looking ? [EDIT]
As I'm new, I can't hit answer right away...
Finally found it - The following technote describes it (albeit briefly) as a security limitation;
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21516415
Issuing;
cd /opt/freeware/bin
sudo chmod -s make
solves this issue for me although I'm left wondering there is some aspect of gmake that may later expect the setuid flag.
IIRC GNU make on AIX needs the setgid flag in order to enable the -l flag, because on this OS you can't retrieve the load average of the system as a normal user (no idea why that is considered more of a security issue than having any program that needs to check the load average be setgid, but... no one asked me).
As long as you don't use -l when running GNU make, you won't have any problem.
I created a batch file for windows that executes some xmlstarlet commands. I want to write it as .sh file so that i can run it on mac. The problem is.. Some commands are working fine in windows but not in mac. It didn't show any error too. Eg.
**xml ed -L -d //intent-filter//category[#android:name='android.intent.category.LAUNCHER'] my_folder\AndroidManifest.xml**
In windows, above command deletes the mentioned xml tag. BUt it does nothing in mac.
But the command
**xml sel -t -m //manifest -v //manifest/#package mim_apk_proj\AndroidManifest.xml**
is working fine in both mac and windows.
I have installed xml tool. Checked /usr/local/bin. It has libxslt.dylib and libxml2.dylib. I dont know where the problem lies?
Can someone help?
The quoting rules for bash (that's the shell on your mac, right?) are different from cmd.exe (the Windows shell), in particular, cmd.exe treats ' as a normal character while to bash it is a quoting character so it isn't passed to the program. In bash you therefore need to quote the 's as well:
xml ed -L -d //intent-filter//category[#android:name='android.intent.category.LAUNCHER'] my_folder\AndroidManifest.xml
# becomes
xml ed -L -d "//intent-filter//category[#android:name='android.intent.category.LAUNCHER'] my_folder\AndroidManifest.xml"
# or, since XPath treats both kinds of quotes identically you can also use
xml ed -L -d '//intent-filter//category[#android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"] my_folder\AndroidManifest.xml'
The second fix is safer because it also prevents bash from doing any variable expansion if you use $, but the first fix has the advantage of working in Windows as well.
I have two unix machines, both running AIX 5.3
My $HOME is mounted on machine1.
Using NFS, login machine2 will go to the same $HOME
I login machine2 first, then machine1.
Both using telnet.
The 2 sessions will share the same .sh_history file.
I found out that the fc -l behavior very strange.
In machine2, I issue the commands in telnet:
fc -l
ksh fc -l
Both give the same output.
In machine1,
fc -l
ksh fc -l
give DIFFERENT results
The result for ksh fc -l
is the same as /usr/bin/fc -l
Also, when I run a script like this:
#!/usr/bin/ksh
fc -l
The result is same as /usr/bin/fc -l
Could anyone tell me what happened?
Alvin SIU
Ah, wisdom of the ancients... (Since this post is over a year old.)
Anyway, I just encountered this problem in Solaris 10. Issue seems to be this: When you define a function in /etc/profile, or in any file called by /etc/profile, your HISTFILE variable gets ignored by the Korn shell, and the shell instead uses ".sh_history" when accessing its history. Not sure why this is.
Result is that you see other root shell's commands. You can test it with :
lsof -p $$
or
cat /proc/$$/fd/63
It's possible that the login shell is not ksh or that $HISTFILE is being reset. One thing you can do is echo $HISTFILE in the various situations and see if it's different. Another thing to check is to see what shell you're in using ps.
Bash (default $HOME/.bash_history), for example, will have a different $HISTFILE than ksh (default $HOME/.sh_history).
Another possible reason for the difference is that the builtin fc may be able to see in-memory history that hasn't been written to disk yet (which the external /usr/bin/fc wouldn't be able to see). If this is true, it may be version dependent. Bash, for example, doesn't write history to the file until the shell exits. Ksh (at least the version I'm using) writes it immediately.
There are many things that all programmers should know, but I am particularly interested in the Unix/Linux commands that we should all know. For accomplishing tasks that we may come up against at some point such as refactoring, reporting, network updates etc.
The reason I am curious is because having previously worked as a software tester at a software company while I am studying my degree, I noticed that all of developers (who were developing Windows software) had 2 computers.
To their left was their Windows XP development machine, and to the right was a Linux box. I think it was Ubuntu. Anyway they told me that they used it because it provided powerful unix operations that Windows couldn't do in their development process.
This makes me curious to know, as a software engineer what do you believe are some of the most powerful scripts/commands/uses that you can perform on a Unix/Linux operating system that every programmer should know for solving real world tasks that may not necessarily relate to writing code?
We all know what sed, awk and grep do. I am interested in some actual Unix/Linux scripting pieces that have solved a difficult problem for you, so that other programmers may benefit. Please provide your story and source.
I am sure there are numerous examples like this that people keep in their 'Scripts' folder.
Update: People seem to be misinterpreting the question. I am not asking for the names of individual unix commands, rather UNIX code snippets that have solved a problem for you.
Best answers from the Community
Traverse a directory tree and print out paths to any files that match a regular expression:
find . -exec grep -l -e 'myregex' {} \; >> outfile.txt
Invoke the default editor(Nano/ViM)
(works on most Unix systems including Mac OS X)
Default editor is whatever your
"EDITOR" environment variable is
set to. ie: export
EDITOR=/usr/bin/pico which is
located at ~/.profile under Mac OS
X.
Ctrl+x Ctrl+e
List all running network connections (including which app they belong to)
lsof -i -nP
Clear the Terminal's search history (Another of my favourites)
history -c
I find commandlinefu.com to be an excellent resource for various shell scripting recipes.
Examples
Common
# Run the last command as root
sudo !!
# Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command
ctrl-x ctrl-e
# Execute a command at a given time
echo "ls -l" | at midnight
Esoteric
# output your microphone to a remote computer's speaker
dd if=/dev/dsp | ssh -c arcfour -C username#host dd of=/dev/dsp
How to exit VI
:wq
Saves the file and ends the misery.
Alternative of ":wq" is ":x" to save and close the vi editor.
grep
awk
sed
perl
find
A lot of Unix power comes from its ability to manipulate text files and filter data. Of course, you can get all of these commands for Windows. They are just not native in the OS, like they are in Unix.
and the ability to chain commands together with pipes etc. This can create extremely powerful single lines of commands from simple functions.
Your shell is the most powerful tool you have available
being able to write simple loops etc
understanding file globbing (e.g. *.java etc.)
being able to put together commands via pipes, subshells. redirection etc.
Having that level of shell knowledge allows you to do enormous amounts on the command line, without having to record info via temporary text files, copy/paste etc., and to leverage off the huge number of utility programs that permit slicing/dicing of data.
Unix Power Tools will show you so much of this. Every time I open my copy I find something new.
I use this so much I am actually ashamed of myself. Remove spaces from all filenames and replace them with an underscore:
[removespaces.sh]
#!/bin/bash
find . -type f -name "* *" | while read file
do
mv "$file" "${file// /_}"
done
My personal favorite is the lsof command.
"lsof" can be used to list opened file descriptors, sockets, and pipes.
I find it extremely useful when trying to figure out which processes have used which ports/files on my machine.
Example: List all internet connections without hostname resolution and without port to port name conversion.
lsof -i -nP
http://www.manpagez.com/man/8/lsof/
If you make a typo in a long command, you can rerun the command with a substitution (in bash):
mkdir ~/aewseomeDirectory
you can see that "awesome" is mispelled, you can type the following to re run the command with the typo corrected
^aew^awe
it then outputs what it substituted (mkdir ~/aweseomeDirectory) and runs the command. (don't forget to undo the damage you did with the incorrect command!)
The tr command is the most under-appreciated command in Unix:
#Convert all input to upper case
ls | tr a-z A-Z
#take the output and put into a single line
ls | tr "\n" " "
#get rid of all numbers
ls -lt | tr -d 0-9
When solving problems on faulty linux boxes, by far the most common key sequence I type end up typing is alt+sysrq R E I S U B
The power of this tools (grep find, awk, sed) comes from their versatility, so giving a particular case seems quite useless.
man is the most powerful comand, because then you can understand what you type instead of just blindly copy pasting from stack overflow.
Example are welcome, but there are already topics for tis.
My most used :
grep something_to_find * -R
which can be replaced by ack and
find | xargs
find with results piped into xargs can be very powerful
some of you might disagree with me, but nevertheless, here's something to talk about. If one learns gawk ( other variants as well) throughly, one can skip learning and using grep/sed/wc/cut/paste and a few other *nix tools. all you need is one good tool to do the job of many combined.
Some way to search (multiple) badly formatted log files, in which the search string may be found on an "orphaned" next line. For example, to display both the 1st, and a concatenated 3rd and 4th line when searching for id = 110375:
[2008-11-08 07:07:01] [INFO] ...; id = 110375; ...
[2008-11-08 07:07:02] [INFO] ...; id = 238998; ...
[2008-11-08 07:07:03] [ERROR] ... caught exception
...; id = 110375; ...
[2008-11-08 07:07:05] [INFO] ...; id = 800612; ...
I guess there must be better solutions (yes, add them...!) than the following concatenation of the two lines using sed prior to actually running grep:
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
echo "Usage: `basename $0` id"
echo "Searches all myproject's logs for the given id"
exit -1
fi
# When finding "caught exception" then append the next line into the pattern
# space bij using "N", and next replace the newline with a colon and a space
# to ensure a single line starting with a timestamp, to allow for sorting
# the output of multiple files:
ls -rt /var/www/rails/myproject/shared/log/production.* \
| xargs cat | sed '/caught exception$/N;s/\n/: /g' \
| grep "id = $1" | sort
...to yield:
[2008-11-08 07:07:01] [INFO] ...; id = 110375; ...
[2008-11-08 07:07:03] [ERROR] ... caught exception: ...; id = 110375; ...
Actually, a more generic solution would append all (possibly multiple) lines that do not start with some [timestamp] to its previous line. Anyone? Not necessarily using sed, of course.
for card in `seq 1 8` ;do
for ts in `seq 1 31` ; do
echo $card $ts >>/etc/tuni.cfg;
done
done
was better than writing the silly 248 lines of config by hand.
Neded to drop some leftover tables that all were prefixed with 'tmp'
for table in `echo show tables | mysql quotiadb |grep ^tmp` ; do
echo drop table $table
done
Review the output, rerun the loop and pipe it to mysql
Finding PIDs without the grep itself showing up
export CUPSPID=`ps -ef | grep cups | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2;}'`
Best answers from the Community
Traverse a directory tree and print out paths to any files that match a regular expression:
find . -exec grep -l -e 'myregex' {} \; >> outfile.txt
Invoke the default editor(Nano/ViM)
(works on most Unix systems including Mac OS X)
Default editor is whatever your
"EDITOR" environment variable is
set to. ie: export
EDITOR=/usr/bin/pico which is
located at ~/.profile under Mac OS
X.
Ctrl+x Ctrl+e
List all running network connections (including which app they belong to)
lsof -i -nP
Clear the Terminal's search history (Another of my favourites)
history -c
Repeat your previous command in bash using !!. I oftentimes run chown otheruser: -R /home/otheruser and forget to use sudo. If you forget sudo, using !! is a little easier than arrow-up and then home.
sudo !!
I'm also not a fan of automatically resolved hostnames and names for ports, so I keep an alias for iptables mapped to iptables -nL --line-numbers. I'm not even sure why the line numbers are hidden by default.
Finally, if you want to check if a process is listening on a port as it should, bound to the right address you can run
netstat -nlp
Then you can grep the process name or port number (-n gives you numeric).
I also love to have the aid of colors in the terminal. I like to add this to my bashrc to remind me whether I'm root without even having to read it. This actually helped me a lot, I never forget sudo anymore.
red='\033[1;31m'
green='\033[1;32m'
none='\033[0m'
if [ $(id -u) -eq 0 ];
then
PS1="[\[$red\]\u\[$none\]#\H \w]$ "
else
PS1="[\[$green\]\u\[$none\]#\H \w]$ "
fi
Those are all very simple commands, but I use them a lot. Most of them even deserved an alias on my machines.
Grep (try Windows Grep)
sed (try Sed for Windows)
In fact, there's a great set of ports of really useful *nix commands available at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/. If you have a *nix background and now use windows, you should probably check them out.
You would be better of if you keep a cheatsheet with you... there is no single command that can be termed most useful. If a perticular command does your job its useful and powerful
Edit you want powerful shell scripts? shell scripts are programs. Get the basics right, build on individual commands and youll get what is called a powerful script. The one that serves your need is powerful otherwise its useless. It would have been better had you mentioned a problem and asked how to solve it.
Sort of an aside, but you can get powershell on windows. Its really powerful and can do a lot of the *nix type stuff. One cool difference is that you work with .net objects instead of text which can be useful if you're using the pipeline for filtering etc.
Alternatively, if you don't need the .NET integration, install Cygwin on the Windows box. (And add its directory to the Windows PATH.)
The fact you can use -name and -iname multiple times in a find command was an eye opener to me.
[findplaysong.sh]
#!/bin/bash
cd ~
echo Matched...
find /home/musicuser/Music/ -type f -iname "*$1*" -iname "*$2*" -exec echo {} \;
echo Sleeping 5 seconds
sleep 5
find /home/musicuser/Music/ -type f -iname "*$1*" -iname "*$2*" -exec mplayer {} \;
exit
When things work on one server but are broken on another the following lets you compare all the related libraries:
export MYLIST=`ldd amule | awk ' { print $3; }'`; for a in $MYLIST; do cksum $a; done
Compare this list with the one between the machines and you can isolate differences quickly.
To run in parallel several processes without overloading too much the machine (in a multiprocessor architecture):
NP=`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l`
#your loop here
if [ `jobs | wc -l` -gt $NP ];
then
wait
fi
launch_your_task_in_background&
#finish your loop here
Start all WebService(s)
find -iname '*weservice*'|xargs -I {} service {} restart
Search a local class in java subdirectory
find -iname '*.java'|xargs grep 'class Pool'
Find all items from file recursivly in subdirectories of current path:
cat searches.txt| xargs -I {} -d, -n 1 grep -r {}
P.S searches.txt: first,second,third, ... ,million
:() { :|: &} ;:
Fork Bomb without root access.
Try it on your own risk.
You can do anything with this...
gcc