Topic

bash

A collection of 4 issues

Shell scripting: short or long format options?

This is something I get asked quite a lot, so I wanted to write a piece about it. This is an extract from the manpage from GNU grep: NAME grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines matching a pattern SYNOPSIS grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...] grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN]... [-f FILE]

badblocks: test your mass storage!

Are you unsure whether your mass storage works properly? Do you suspect it's faulty somewhere? Verify it with a nifty tool, included in most Linux distros and in macOS if you install the ext2fs tools: sudo badblocks -swv -t random -b 4096 -c 2048 <DEVICE> It will perform

Quick log for bash scripts, with line limit

Sometimes you need to write a quick shell script; many a time, you need to put it on a server, and launch it every now and then, or run it in a cron job. That script may end up doing something important and/or altering the state of the server

Disown is your friend

Bash builtin disown is a not-so-well known [job control command] http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Job-Control-Builtins.html), and yet it's an extremely useful one. So what? You've started a remote ssh session, launched some command which is taking very, very long to complete, and you just