Commands using sleep

Log a command's votes,

then run:

Very useful in shell scripts because you can run a task nicely in the background using job-control and output progress until it completes.

Here's an example of how I use it in backup scripts to run gpg in the background to encrypt an archive file (which I create in this same way). $! is the process ID of the last run command, which is saved here as the variable PI, then sleeper is called with the process id of the gpg task (PI), and sleeper is also specified to output : instead of the default . every 3 seconds instead of the default 1. So a shorter version would be sleeper $!;

The wait is also used here, though it may not be needed on your system.

Previously to get around the $! not always being available, I would instead check for the existance of the process ID by checking if the directory /proc/$PID existed, but not everyone uses proc anymore. That version is currently the one at http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html but I plan on upgrading to this new version soon.

This will log your internet download speed.

You can run

to get a graph of it.

Get sopcast links for live sports from http://myp2p.eu (for example)

Get sp-sc or sp-auth binary by googling (sopcast + linux)

eg http://www.jbg.f2s.com/sp-sc.gz

Requires the 32bit libstdc++5 package.

After exiting mplayer, type 'killall sp-sc'

[Note: This command needs to be run as root].

If you are downloading something large at night, you can start wget as a normal user and issue the above command as root. When the download is done, the computer will automatically go to sleep. If at any time you feel the computer should not go to sleep automatically(like if you find the download still continuing in the morning), just create an empty file called nosleep in /tmp directory.

Rainbow, instead of greys

I wanted to keep a backup of my company database server on my local homeserver. After I found maatkit to sync databases, everything except security seemed fine. SSH takes care of that part.

checkfor: have the shell check anything you're waiting for.

'while : ; do' is an infinite loop

'$*' executes the command passed in

'sleep 5' - change for your tastes, sleep for 5 seconds

bash, ksh, likely sh, maybe zsh

Ctrl-c to break the loop

doesn't require "at", change the "2h" to whatever you want... (deafult unit for sleep is seconds)

#Usage: watch timeinsecond "command"

Ummmm.. Saw that gem on some dead-head hippies VW bus at phish this summer.. It's actually one of my favorite ways of using bash, very clean. It shows what you can do with the cool advanced features like job control, redirection, combining commands that don't wait for each other, and the thing I like the most is the use of the ( ) to make this process heirarchy below, which comes in very handy when using fifos for adding optimization to your scripts or commands with similar acrobatics.

F UID PID PPID WCHAN RSS PSR CMD

1 gplovr 30667 1 wait 1324 1 -bash

0 gplovr 30672 30667 - 516 3 \_ sleep 3

1 gplovr 30669 1 wait 1324 1 -bash

0 gplovr 30673 30669 - 516 0 \_ sleep 5

1 gplovr 30671 1 wait 1324 1 -bash

0 gplovr 30674 30671 - 516 1 \_ sleep 7

the command for the impatient sysadmin: simply checks every five secs, if a host or a specific service running on it is up. ideal for hosts that are configured not to respond on pings.

This command produces the output of "du -sk testfile" in every 10 seconds. You can change the command to be whatever you want.

Same as above but slooooow it down

Seen here: http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/terminal_colours/

Sleep 5h and plays the song as a wake up alarm

Uses logger in a while loop to log memory statistics frequently into the local syslog server.

Chronic Bash function:

Note: use 'jobs' to list background tasks and fg/bg to take control of them.

See smbstatus Output within a 5 second interval (for monitoring smb access)

The variable WIRELESSINTERFACE indicates your wireless interface

Schedule your Mac to sleep at any future time.

Also wake, poweron, shutdown, wakeorpoweron. Or repeating with

Query with

Lots more at http://www.macenterprise.org/articles/powermanagementandschedulingviathecommandline

Change your wallpaper every thirty minutes (or however long you like, I suppose) to a randomly selected image in a directory and subdirectories. Bear in mind this is not safe to use if anyone else has write access to your image directory.

You can use this to loop any command to periodically see the output.

Alternatively, you can put it in a simple shell script to save typing!

#/!bin/bash

while true; do $1; sleep $2; done;