I use crontask to regularly run Rscript. Unfortunately, I need to do this on a small instance of aws and the process may hang, building more and more processes on top of each other until the whole system is lagging.
I would like to write a crontask to kill all R processes lasting longer than one minute. I found another answer on Stack Overflow that I've adapted that I think would solve the problem. I came up with;
if [[ "$(uname)" = "Linux" ]];then killall --older-than 1m "/usr/lib/R/bin/exec/R --slave --no-restore --file=/home/ubuntu/script.R";fi
I copied the task directly from htop, but it does not work as I expect. I get the No such file or directory error but I've checked it a few times.
I need to kill all R processes that have lasted longer than a minute. How can I do this?
You may want to avoid killing processes from another user and try SIGKILL (kill -9) after SIGTERM (kill -15). Here is a script you could execute every minute with a CRON job:
#!/bin/bash
PROCESS="R"
MAXTIME=`date -d '00:01:00' +'%s'`
function killpids()
{
PIDS=`pgrep -u "${USER}" -x "${PROCESS}"`
# Loop over all matching PIDs
for pid in ${PIDS}; do
# Retrieve duration of the process
TIME=`ps -o time:1= -p "${pid}" |
egrep -o "[0-9]{0,2}:?[0-9]{0,2}:[0-9]{2}$"`
# Convert TIME to timestamp
TTIME=`date -d "${TIME}" +'%s'`
# Check if the process should be killed
if [ "${TTIME}" -gt "${MAXTIME}" ]; then
kill ${1} "${pid}"
fi
done
}
# Leave a chance to kill processes properly (SIGTERM)
killpids "-15"
sleep 5
# Now kill remaining processes (SIGKILL)
killpids "-9"
Why imply an additional process every minute with cron?
Would it not be easier to start R with timeout from coreutils, the processes will then be killed automatically after the time you chose.
timeout [option] duration command [arg]…
I think the best option is to do this with R itself. I am no expert, but it seems the future package will allow executing a function in a separate thread. You could run the actual task in a separate thread, and in the main thread sleep for 60 seconds and then stop().
Previous Update
user1747036's answer which recommends timeout is a better alternative.
My original answer
This question is more appropriate for superuser, but here are a few things wrong with
if [[ "$(uname)" = "Linux" ]];then
killall --older-than 1m \
"/usr/lib/R/bin/exec/R --slave --no-restore --file=/home/ubuntu/script.R";
fi
The name argument is either the name of image or path to it. You have included parameters to it as well
If -s signal is not specified killall sends SIGTERM which your process may ignore. Are you able to kill a long running script with this on the command line? You may need SIGKILL / -9
More at http://linux.die.net/man/1/killall
i'm running a script from ASP.NET/C# using SharpSsh. I realize when the script runs and i do a ps -ef grep from unix, i see the same script running twice, one in csh -c, and the other with ksh. The script has shebang ksh, so i'm not sure why a copy of csh is also running. Also if i run the same script directly from unix, only one copy runs with ksh. There's no other shell running from within the script.
Most Unix/Linux now have a command or option that will show process trees, with indented list like, look for -t or -T options to ps OR ptree OR ???
USER PID PPID START TT TIME CMD
daemon 1 1 11-03-06 ? 0 init
myusr 221568 1 11-03-07 tty10 1.00s \_ -ksh
myusr 350976 221568 07:52:11 tty10 0 | \_ ps -efT
I bet you'll see that the csh is the user login shell that includes your script as an argument ( you may have to use different options to ps to see the full command-line of the csh process) AND as a sub process you'll see ksh executing your script, and further sub-processes under ksh for any external commands that the script is calling.
I hope this helps.
P.S. as you appear to be a new user, if you get an answer that helps you please remember to mark it as accepted, or give it a + (or -) as a useful answer.
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
I would like to use killall on a process of the same name from which killall will be executed without killing the process spawning the killall.
So in more detail, say I have process foo, and process foo is running. I want to be able to run "foo -k", and have the new foo kill the old foo, without killing itself.
pgrep foo | grep -v $$ | xargs kill
If you don't have pgrep, you'll have to come up with some other way of generating the list of PIDs of interest. Some options are:
Use ps with appropriate options, followed by some combination of grep, sed and/or awk to match the processes and extract the PIDs.
killall can send a signal 0 instead of SIGTERM; the standard semantics of this is that it doesn't send a signal, but just determines if the process is alive or not. Perhaps you can use killall to select the process list and get it to print the PIDs of the matching ones that are alive. This would also probably require a bit of post-processing with sed.
There may be something along the lines of Linux's /proc filesystem with pseudo-files holding system data that you could grovel through. Again, grep/awk/sed are your friends here.
If you truly need particular details on how to do this, comment or send me mail, and I'll try expanding some of these options in more detail.
[Edits: added further options for those without pgrep.]
This seems to work on OS X:
killall -s foo | perl -ne 'system $_ unless /\b'$PPID'\b/'
killall -s lists what it would do, one PID at a time. Do what it would do except for killing yourself.
The usual way to solve this is to have foo write its process ID to a file, say something like /var/run/foo.pid when it is run in daemon mode. Then you can have the non-daemon version read the PID from the PID file and call kill(2) on it directly. This is usually how apache and the like handle it. Of course the newer OSX daemons go through launchd(8) instead, but there are still a few that use good old fashioned signals.