Bash : Power of Pipes

Subtitle: "Get IP Address Easily"

When I say easily, I mean not so easily, but with the proper tools... Let me explain, it's been one of those days... I've a remote server running some flavour of Linux, and no-one knows it's remote IP Address, they all SSH into the box run "ifconfig" and note down the value, they then plug this into a config (or worse still were baking it directly into some code) and running their services....

The trouble of course being, years later, they're no-longer the programmers nor maintainers of this machine, I am...

And to be frank whenever the IP address changes I don't want to recompile their java code, nor use vi to edit the various configuration files, I want a script to at least update the settings automatically.

I therefore changed their code to load the IP address, not hard code it, and used some other scripts to put the IP address into the config file at boot...

The first line of that script is what I'm going to document here... so it starts:

#! /bin/bash

ifconfig | grep inet | tr ' ' '\n' | sed -u '/^$/d' | head -2 | tail -1 > ipaddress.txt

This script gives me a single line of text with the IP Address in it, for the one and only adapter in the machine, if you have multiple adapters you'd have to play about with the grep inet to select the row you want with a head & tail call before moving into the  final location, or whatever...

I wrote this up however, and immediately started to use the IP address.

The net result was a request to explain all this functionality to a colleague... Here's what I came up with.

ifconfig gets us the adapter information...

grep strips off lines we don't want only giving lines for the inet adapter

translate turns spaces into new lines

the sed call removes the blank lines, giving just the IP address and some guff

the first adapter IP address is therefore always the second line of this output

we select the first two lines with head

then select only the latter of these two with tail

and write this to a file

Her reply... "What are the Lines?"....

"What lines?"...

"These | things"....

"They're pipes, I'm piping the information from one program to the next..."

"Oh"

"Do you know what pipes do in Unix and Linux?"

"No"

I sent her to this video... https://youtu.be/XvDZLjaCJuw?t=5m15s

Linux Server Admin : Bash Kill Processes By Common Name

On my Linux server I've recently wanted to go through and kill a bunch of application instances in one go, this is a server where students have been connecting and running carious programs under python, therefore I want to remove from my processes anything called "python".

We can see these in our bash shell with the command:

sudo ps -aux | grep python

To remove all these programs I create the following bash shell script:

k = 0

for i in $(ps -aux | grep python)

do

  k=`expr $k + 1`

  kill -9 $i  

done

logger -s "Closed $k Python Instances"

Notice k=`exp... this is NOT a single quote (apostrophe) it is the "smart quote" on a UK English keyboard this is the key to the left of the number 1.  It is used to substitute the command into place, so the value counted in K becomes the result of the expression "$k + 1", i.e. K+1.  More about Command Substitution in Bash here.

The call to logger -s places the message both on screen and in syslog for me to review later.

This simply loops through all the applications resident and kills them off, I've saved this as a "sh" file, added executable rights with "sudo chmod +x ./killpythons.sh" and I created this to run as a cron job everyday at 3am (a pretty safe time, unless I have some students burning the candle at both ends).

That's everything about the bash script, for those of you wondering about the students, they're those folks following my learning examples from my book, which you can buy here.