A nice way to interrupt a sleep with a signal.

This will write to TAPE (LTO3-4 in my case) a backup of files/folders. Could be changed to write to DVD/Blueray.

Go to the directory where you want to write the output files : cd /bklogs

Enter a name in bkname="Backup1", enter folders/files in tobk="/home /var/www".

It will create a tar and write it to the tape drive on /dev/nst0.

In the process, it will

1) generate a sha512 sum of the tar to $bkname.sha512; so you can validate that your data is intact

2) generate a filelist of the content of the tar with filesize to $bkname.lst

3) buffer the tar file to prevent shoe-shining the tape (I use 4GB for lto3(80mb/sec), 8gb for lto4 (120mb/sec), 3Tb usb3 disks support those speed, else I use 3x2tb raidz.

4) show buffer in/out speed and used space in the buffer

5) show progress bar with time approximation using pv

ADD :

To eject the tape :

; sleep 75; mt-st -f /dev/nst0 rewoffl

TODO:

1) When using old tapes, if the buffer is full and the drive slows down, it means the tape is old and would need to be replaced instead of wiping it and recycling it for an other backup. Logging where and when it slows down could provide good information on the wear of the tape. I don't know how to get that information from the mbuffer output and to trigger a "This tape slowed down X times at Y1gb, Y2gb, Y3gb down to Zmb/s for a total of 30sec. It would be wise to replace this tape next time you want to write to it."

2) Fix filesize approximation

3) Save all the output to $bkname.log with progress update being new lines. (any one have an idea?)

4) Support spanning on multiple tape.

5) Replace tar format with something else (dar?); looking at xar right now (https://code.google.com/p/xar/), xml metadata could contain per file checksum, compression algorithm (bzip2, xv, gzip), gnupg encryption, thumbnail, videopreview, image EXIF... But that's an other project.

TIP:

1) You can specify the width of the progressbar of pv. If its longer than the terminal, line refresh will be written to new lines. That way you can see if there was speed slowdown during writing.

2) Remove the v in tar argument cvf to prevent listing all files added to the archive.

3) You can get tarsum (http://www.guyrutenberg.com/2009/04/29/tarsum-02-a-read-only-version-of-tarsum/)

and add >(tarsum --checksum sha256 > $bkname_list.sha256) after the tee to generate checksums of individual files !

Similarly for last wake time:

pauses exactly long enough to wake at the top of the hour

Cleaned up and silent with &>/dev/null at the end.

Execute commands serially on a list of hosts. Each ssh connection is made in the background so that if, after five seconds, it hasn't closed, it will be killed and the script will go on to the next system.

Maybe there's an easier way to set a timeout in the ssh options...

For use when you can't use "watch" (user-defined functions, aliases). This isn't mine - its an alternate posted in the comments by flatcap, and is the shortest and easiest to remember.

Displays an animated hourglass for x amount of seconds

Using sys

the "delay" utility is an invaluable tool for me. with gnu-screen it allows you to schedule something and have it run and output to the current terminal, unlike "at".

You can also use it like "sleep" with seconds and also with date:

delay until 13:33 friday && echo test

get it from: http://onegeek.org/~tom/software/delay/current/delay.c

(author: Tom Rothamel)

this will open a new tab in firefox for every line in a file

the sleep is removable but i found that if you have a large list of urls 50+, and no sleep, it will try to open all the urls at once and this will cause them all to load a lot slower, also depending on the ram of your system sleep gives you a chance to close the tabs before they overload your ram, removing & >2/dev/null will yield unpredictable results.

Countdown clock - Counts down from $MIN minutes to zero.

I let the date command do the maths.

This version doesn't use seq.

Cycles continuously through a string printing each character with a random delay less than 1 second. First parameter is min, 2nd is max. Example: 1 3 means sleep random .1 to .3. Experiment with different values. The 3rd parameter is the string. The sleep will help with battery life/power consumption.

Fans of "The Shining" might get a kick out of this:

No need to be root to do that. Relies on UPower (previously known as DeviceKit-Power).

It suspends to RAM: you always need your batteries for the RAM but it saves time as there is no need to slowly archive everything on your hard disk.

It works fine with me but if anyone has a nicer way, please contribute.

Another way of counting the line output of tail over 10s not requiring pv.

Cut to have the average per second rate :

tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 10; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2

You can also enclose it in a loop and send stderr to /dev/null :

while true; do tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 2; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2; done 2>/dev/null

or "Execute a command with a timeout"

Run a command in background, sleep 10 seconds, kill it.

You can test it with:

find /& sleep10; kill $!