ksh: how to probe stdin? - unix

I want my ksh script to have different behaviors depending on whether there is something incoming through stdin or not:
(1) cat file.txt | ./script.ksh (then do "cat <&0 >./tmp.dat" and process tmp.dat)
vs. (2) ./script.ksh (then process $1 which must be a readable regular file)
Checking for stdin to see if it is a terminal[ -t 0 ] is not helpful, because my script is called from an other script.
Doing "cat <&0 >./tmp.dat" to check tmp.dat's size hangs up waiting for an EOF from stdin if stdin is "empty" (2nd case).
How to just check if stdin is "empty" or not?!

EDIT: You are running on HP-UX
Tested [ -t 0 ] on HP-UX and it appears to be working for me. I have used the following setup:
/tmp/x.ksh:
#!/bin/ksh
/tmp/y.ksh
/tmp/y.ksh:
#!/bin/ksh
test -t 0 && echo "terminal!"
Running /tmp/x.ksh prints: terminal!
Could you confirm the above on your platform, and/or provide an alternate test setup more closely reflecting your situation? Is your script ultimately spawned by cron?
EDIT 2
If desperate, and if Perl is available, define:
stdin_ready() {
TIMEOUT=$1; shift
perl -e '
my $rin = "";
vec($rin,fileno(STDIN),1) = 1;
select($rout=$rin, undef, undef, '$TIMEOUT') < 1 && exit 1;
'
}
stdin_ready 1 || 'stdin not ready in 1 second, assuming terminal'
EDIT 3
Please note that the timeout may need to be significant if your input comes from sort, ssh etc. (all these programs can spawn and establish the pipe with your script seconds or minutes before producing any data over it.) Also, using a hefty timeout may dramatically penalize your script when there is nothing on the input to begin with (e.g. terminal.)
If potentially large timeouts are a problem, and if you can influence the way in which your script is called, then you may want to force the callers to explicitly instruct your program whether stdin should be used, via a custom option or in the standard GNU or tar manner (e.g. script [options [--]] FILE ..., where FILE can be a file name, a - to denote standard input, or a combination thereof, and your script would only read from standard input if - were passed in as a parameter.)

This strategy works for bash, and would likely work for ksh. Poll 'tty':
#!/bin/bash
set -a
if [ "$( tty )" == 'not a tty' ]
then
STDIN_DATA_PRESENT=1
else
STDIN_DATA_PRESENT=0
fi
if [ ${STDIN_DATA_PRESENT} -eq 1 ]
then
echo "Input was found."
else
echo "Input was not found."
fi

Why not solve this in a more traditional way, and use the command line argument to indicate that the data will be coming from stdin?
For an example, consider the difference between:
echo foo | cat -
and
echo foo > /tmp/test.txt
cat /tmp/test.txt

Related

How to create options in KSH script

I am creating a KSH interface script that will call other scripts based on the users input. The other scripts are Encrypt and Decrypt. Each one of these scripts receive parameters. I have seen someone execute a script before using "-" + first letter of a script name before. How do I do this for my script? So for example if my script is called menu and the user typed in : menu -e *UserID Filename.txt* the script would run and the encrypt script would be executed along with the associated parameters. So far my script takes in the encrypt/decrypt script option as a parameter. Here is my script:
#!/bin/ksh
#I want this parameter to become an
action=$1
if [ $1 = "" ]
then
print_message "Parameters not satisfied"
exit 1
fi
#check for action commands
if [ $1 = "encrypt" ]
then
dest=$2
fileName=$3
./Escript $dest $fileName
elif [ $1 = "decrypt" ]
then
outputF=$2
encryptedF=$3
./Dscript $outputF $encryptedF
else
print "Parameters not satisfied. Please enter encrypt or decrypt plus-n arguments"
fi
Thanks for the help!
There isn't any kind of automatic way to turn a parameter into another script to run; what you're doing is pretty much how you would do it. Check the parameter, and based on the contents, run the two different scripts.
You can structure it somewhat more nicely using case, and you can pass the later parameters directly through to the other script using "$#", with a shift to strip off the first parameter. Something like:
[ $# -ge 1 ] || (echo "Not enough parameters"; exit 1)
command=$1
shift
case $command in
-e|--encrypt) ./escript "$#" ;;
-d|--decrypt) ./dscript "$#" ;;
*) echo "Unknown option $command"; exit 1 ;;
esac
This also demonstrates how you can implement both short and long options, by providing two different strings to match against in a single case statement (-e and --encrypt), in case that's what you were asking about. You can also use globs, like -e*) to allow any option starting with -e such as -e, -encrypt, -elephant, though this may not be what you're looking for.

How can I tell if a makefile is being run from an interactive shell?

I have a makefile which runs commands that can take a while. I'd like those commands to be chatty if the build is initiated from an interactive shell but quieter if not (specifically, by cron). Something along the lines of (pseudocode):
foo_opts = -a -b -c
if (make was invoked from an interactive shell):
foo_opts += --verbose
all: bar baz
foo $(foo_opts)
This is GNU make. If the specifics of what I'm doing matter, I can edit the question.
It isn't strictly determining whether it is invoked from an interactive shell or not, but for a cron job in which the output is redirected to a file, the answer to this question would be the same as for How to detect if my shell script is running through a pipe?:
if [ -t 0 ]
then
# input is from a terminal
fi
Edit: To use this to set a variable in a Makefile (in GNU make, that is):
INTERACTIVE:=$(shell [ -t 0 ] && echo 1)
ifdef INTERACTIVE
# is a terminal
else
# cron job
endif
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part5/section-5.html
5.5) How can I tell if I am running an interactive shell?
In the C shell category, look for the variable $prompt.
In the Bourne shell category, you can look for the variable $PS1,
however, it is better to check the variable $-. If $- contains
an 'i', the shell is interactive. Test like so:
case $- in
*i*) # do things for interactive shell
;;
*) # do things for non-interactive shell
;;
esac
I do not think you can easily find out. I suggest adopting an alternative strategy, probably by quelling the verbose output from the cron job. I would look to do that using a makefile like this:
VERBOSE = --verbose
foo_opts = -a -b -c ${VERBOSE}
all: bar baz
foo $(foo_opts)
Then, in the cron job, specify:
make VERBOSE=
This command-line specification of VERBOSE overrides the one in the makefile (and cannot be changed by the makefile). That way, the specialized task (cron job) that you set up once and use many times will be done without the verbose output; the general task of building will be done verbosely (unless you elect to override the verbose-ness on the command line).
One minor advantage of this technique is that it will work with any variant of make; it does not depend on any GNU Make facility.
I’m not really sure what "am interactive" means. Do you mean if you have a valid /dev/tty? If so, then you could check that. Most of us check isatty on stdin, though, because it answers the questions we want to know: is there someone there to type something.
Just a note: you can also see the related discussion that I had about detecting redirection of STDOUT from inside a Makefile.
I believe it will be helpful to readers of this question - executive summary:
-include piped.mk
all: piped.mk
ifeq ($(PIPED),1)
#echo Output of make is piped because PIPED is ${PIPED}
else
#echo Output of make is NOT piped because PIPED is ${PIPED}
endif
#rm -f piped.mk
piped.mk:
#[ -t 1 ] && PIPED=0 || PIPED=1 ; echo "PIPED=$${PIPED}" > piped.mk
$ make
Output of make is NOT piped because PIPED is 0
$ make | more
Output of make is piped because PIPED is 1
In my answer there I explain why the [-t 1] has to be done in an action and not in a variable assignment (as in the recommended answer here), as well as the various pitfalls regarding re-evaluation of a generated Makefile (i.e. the piped.mk above).
The term interactive in this question seems to imply redirection of STDIN... in which case replacing [ -t 1 ] with [ -t 0 ] in my code above should work as-is.
Hope this helps.

Unix strace command

I found the following bash script in order to monitor cp progress.
#!/bin/sh
cp_p()
{
strace -q -ewrite cp -- "${1}" "${2}" 2>&1 \
| awk '{
count += $NF
if (count % 10 == 0) {
percent = count / total_size * 100
printf "%3d%% [", percent
for (i=0;i<=percent;i++)
printf "="
printf ">"
for (i=percent;i<100;i++)
printf " "
printf "]\r"
}
}
END { print "" }' total_size=$(stat -c '%s' "${1}") count=0
}
I don't understand the "-ewrite" option for the strace command. The closest thing I've found is the man page for strace which is
-e write=set Perform a full hexadecimal and ASCII dump of all the
data written to file descriptors
listed in the specified set. For
example, to see all output activity on
file descriptors 3 and 5 use -e
write=3,5. Note that this is
independent from the normal tracing of
the write(2) system call which is
controlled by the option -e
trace=write.
However I don't understand what the -ewrite option does.
-ewrite means that only the "write" system call will be traced.
-e expr A qualifying expression which modifies which events
to trace or how to trace them. The format of the
expression is:
[qualifier=][!]value1[,value2]...
where qualifier is one of trace, abbrev, verbose,
raw, signal, read, or write and value is a quali-
fier-dependent symbol or number. The default qual-
ifier is trace. Using an exclamation mark negates
the set of values. For example, -eopen means lit-
erally -e trace=open which in turn means trace only
the open system call. By contrast, -etrace=!open
means to trace every system call except open. In
addition, the special values all and none have the
obvious meanings.
Note that some shells use the exclamation point for
history expansion even inside quoted arguments. If
so, you must escape the exclamation point with a
backslash.

'tee' and exit status

Is there an alternative to tee which captures standard output and standard error of the command being executed and exits with the same exit status as the processed command?
Something like the following:
eet -a some.log -- mycommand --foo --bar
Where "eet" is an imaginary alternative to "tee" :) (-a means append and -- separates the captured command). It shouldn't be hard to hack such a command, but maybe it already exists and I'm not aware of it?
This works with Bash:
(
set -o pipefail
mycommand --foo --bar | tee some.log
)
The parentheses are there to limit the effect of pipefail to just the one command.
From the bash(1) man page:
The return status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command, unless the pipefail option is enabled. If pipefail is enabled, the pipeline's return status is the value of the last (rightmost) command to exit with a non-zero status, or zero if all commands exit successfully.
I stumbled upon a couple of interesting solutions at Capture Exit Code Using Pipe & Tee.
There is the $PIPESTATUS variable available in Bash:
false | tee /dev/null
[ $PIPESTATUS -eq 0 ] || exit $PIPESTATUS
And the simplest prototype of "eet" in Perl may look as follows:
open MAKE, "command 2>&1 |" or die;
open (LOGFILE, ">>some.log") or die;
while (<MAKE>) {
print LOGFILE $_;
print
}
close MAKE; # To get $?
my $exit = $? >> 8;
close LOGFILE;
Here's an eet. Works with every Bash I can get my hands on, from 2.05b to 4.0.
#!/bin/bash
tee_args=()
while [[ $# > 0 && $1 != -- ]]; do
tee_args=("${tee_args[#]}" "$1")
shift
done
shift
# now ${tee_args[*]} has the arguments before --,
# and $* has the arguments after --
# redirect standard out through a pipe to tee
exec | tee "${tee_args[#]}"
# do the *real* exec of the desired program
exec "$#"
(pipefail and $PIPESTATUS are nice, but I recall them being introduced in 3.1 or thereabouts.)
This is what I consider to be the best pure-Bourne-shell solution to use as the base upon which you could build your "eet":
# You want to pipe command1 through command2:
exec 4>&1
exitstatus=`{ { command1; echo $? 1>&3; } | command2 1>&4; } 3>&1`
# $exitstatus now has command1's exit status.
I think this is best explained from the inside out – command1 will execute and print its regular output on stdout (file descriptor 1), then once it's done, echo will execute and print command1's exit code on its stdout, but that stdout is redirected to file descriptor three.
While command1 is running, its stdout is being piped to command2 (echo's output never makes it to command2 because we send it to file descriptor 3 instead of 1, which is what the pipe reads). Then we redirect command2's output to file descriptor 4, so that it also stays out of file descriptor one – because we want file descriptor one clear for when we bring the echo output on file descriptor three back down into file descriptor one so that the command substitution (the backticks) can capture it.
The final bit of magic is that first exec 4>&1 we did as a separate command – it opens file descriptor four as a copy of the external shell's stdout. Command substitution will capture whatever is written on standard out from the perspective of the commands inside it – but, since command2's output is going to file descriptor four as far as the command substitution is concerned, the command substitution doesn't capture it – however, once it gets "out" of the command substitution, it is effectively still going to the script's overall file descriptor one.
(The exec 4>&1 has to be a separate command to work with many common shells. In some shells it works if you just put it on the same line as the variable assignment, after the closing backtick of the substitution.)
(I use compound commands ({ ... }) in my example, but subshells (( ... )) would also work. The subshell will just cause a redundant forking and awaiting of a child process, since each side of a pipe and the inside of a command substitution already normally implies a fork and await of a child process, and I don't know of any shell being coded to recognize that it can skip one of those forks because it's already done or is about to do the other.)
You can look at it in a less technical and more playful way, as if the outputs of the commands are leapfrogging each other: command1 pipes to command2, then the echo's output jumps over command2 so that command2 doesn't catch it, and then command2's output jumps over and out of the command substitution just as echo lands just in time to get captured by the substitution so that it ends up in the variable, and command2's output goes on its way to the standard output, just as in a normal pipe.
Also, as I understand it, at the end of this command, $? will still contain the return code of the second command in the pipe, because variable assignments, command substitutions, and compound commands are all effectively transparent to the return code of the command inside them, so the return status of command2 should get propagated out.
A caveat is that it is possible that command1 will at some point end up using file descriptors three or four, or that command2 or any of the later commands will use file descriptor four, so to be more hygienic, we would do:
exec 4>&1
exitstatus=`{ { command1 3>&-; echo $? 1>&3; } 4>&- | command2 1>&4; } 3>&1`
exec 4>&-
Commands inherit file descriptors from the process that launches them, so the entire second line will inherit file descriptor four, and the compound command followed by 3>&1 will inherit the file descriptor three. So the 4>&- makes sure that the inner compound command will not inherit file descriptor four, and the 3>&- makes sure that command1 will not inherit file descriptor three, so command1 gets a 'cleaner', more standard environment. You could also move the inner 4>&- next to the 3>&-, but I figure why not just limit its scope as much as possible.
Almost no programs uses pre-opened file descriptor three and four directly, so you almost never have to worry about it, but the latter is probably best to keep in mind and use for general-purpose cases.
{ mycommand --foo --bar 2>&1; ret=$?; } | tee -a some.log; (exit $ret)
KornShell, all in one line:
foo; RET_VAL=$?; if test ${RET_VAL} != 0;then echo $RET_VAL; echo Error occurred!>/tmp/out.err;exit 2;fi |tee >>/tmp/out.err ; if test ${RET_VAL} != 0;then exit $RET_VAL;fi
#!/bin/sh
logfile="$1"
shift
exec 2>&1
exec "$#" | tee "$logfile"
Hopefully this works for you.
Assuming Bash or Z shell (zsh),
my_command >>my_log 2>&1
N.B. The sequence of redirection and duplication of standard error onto standard output is significant!
I didn't realise you wanted to see the output on screen as well. This will of course direct all output to the file my_log.

Breaking out of "tail -f" that's being read by a "while read" loop in HP-UX

I'm trying to write a (sh -bourne shell) script that processes lines as they are written to a file. I'm attempting to do this by feeding the output of tail -f into a while read loop. This tactic seems to be proper based on my research in Google as well as this question dealing with a similar issue, but using bash.
From what I've read, it seems that I should be able to break out of the loop when the file being followed ceases to exist. It doesn't. In fact, it seems the only way I can break out of this is to kill the process in another session. tail does seem to be working fine otherwise as testing with this:
touch file
tail -f file | while read line
do
echo $line
done
Data I append to file in another session appears just file from the loop processing written above.
This is on HP-UX version B.11.23.
Thanks for any help/insight you can provide!
If you want to break out, when your file does not exist any more, just do it:
test -f file || break
Placing this in your loop, should break out.
The remaining problem is, how to break the read line, as this is blocking.
This could you do by applying a timeout, like read -t 5 line. Then every 5 second the read returns, and in case the file does not longer exist, the loop will break. Attention: Create your loop that it can handle the case, that the read times out, but the file is still present.
EDIT: Seems that with timeout read returns false, so you could combine the test with the timeout, the result would be:
tail -f test.file | while read -t 3 line || test -f test.file; do
some stuff with $line
done
I don't know about HP-UX tail but GNU tail has the --follow=name option which will follow the file by name (by re-opening the file every few seconds instead of reading from the same file descriptor which will not detect if the file is unlinked) and will exit when the filename used to open the file is unlinked:
tail --follow=name test.txt
Unless you're using GNU tail, there is no way it'll terminate of its own accord when following a file. The -f option is really only meant for interactive monitoring--indeed, I have a book that says that -f "is unlikely to be of use in shell scripts".
But for a solution to the problem, I'm not wholly sure this isn't an over-engineered way to do it, but I figured you could send the tail to a FIFO, then have a function or script that checked the file for existence and killed off the tail if it'd been unlinked.
#!/bin/sh
sentinel ()
{
while true
do
if [ ! -e $1 ]
then
kill $2
rm /tmp/$1
break
fi
done
}
touch $1
mkfifo /tmp/$1
tail -f $1 >/tmp/$1 &
sentinel $1 $! &
cat /tmp/$1 | while read line
do
echo $line
done
Did some naïve testing, and it seems to work okay, and not leave any garbage lying around.
I've never been happy with this answer but I have not found an alternative either:
kill $(ps -o pid,cmd --no-headers --ppid $$ | grep tail | awk '{print $1}')
Get all processes that are children of the current process, look for the tail, print out the first column (tail's pid), and kill it. Sin-freaking-ugly indeed, such is life.
The following approach backgrounds the tail -f file command, echos its process id plus a custom string prefix (here tailpid: ) to the while loop where the line with the custom string prefix triggers another (backgrounded) while loop that every 5 seconds checks if file is still existing. If not, tail -f file gets killed and the subshell containing the backgrounded while loop exits.
# cf. "The Heirloom Bourne Shell",
# http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/sh.html,
# http://sourceforge.net/projects/heirloom/files/heirloom-sh/ and
# http://freecode.com/projects/bournesh
/usr/local/bin/bournesh -c '
touch file
(tail -f file & echo "tailpid: ${!}" ) | while IFS="" read -r line
do
case "$line" in
tailpid:*) while sleep 5; do
#echo hello;
if [ ! -f file ]; then
IFS=" "; set -- ${line}
kill -HUP "$2"
exit
fi
done &
continue ;;
esac
echo "$line"
done
echo exiting ...
'

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