Commands using sleep

Not as taxing on the CPU.

Dialog's gauge widget accepts progress updates on stdin. This version runs dialog once and updates it every second.

There's no need to use timeout which causes screen flicker since it restarts dialog for each update.

usage examples

ls largedir |rd

lynx -dump largewebsite.com |rd

rd < largelogfile

This is like ping -a, but it does the opposite. It alerts you if the network is down, not up. Note that the beep will be from the speaker on the server, not from your terminal.

Once a second, this script checks if the Internet is accessible and beeps if it is not. I define the Net as being "UP", if I can ping Google's public DNS server (8.8.8.8), but of course you could pick a different static IP address. I redirect the beep to /dev/console so that I can run this in the background from /etc/rc.local. Of course, doing that requires that the script is run by a UID or GID that has write permissions to /dev/console (usually only root).

Question: I am not sure if the -W1 flag works under BSD. I have only tested this under GNU/Linux using ping from iputils. If anybody knows how portable -W is, please post a comment.

enable each bash completion that you have installed at your system, that's very nice ;)

Thank You, hackerb9!

In general, this is actually not better than the "scrot -d4" command I'm listing it as an alternative to, so please don't vote it down for that. I'm adding this command because xwd (X window dumper) comes with X11, so it is already installed on your machine, whereas scrot probably is not. I've found xwd handy on boxen that I don't want to (or am not allowed to) install packages on.

NOTE: The dd junk for renaming the file is completely optional. I just did that for fun and because it's interesting that xwd embeds the window title in its metadata. I probably should have just parsed the output from file(1) instead of cutting it out with dd(1), but this was more fun and less error prone.

NOTE2: Many programs don't know what to do with an xwd format image file. You can convert it to something normal using NetPBM's xwdtopnm(1) or ImageMagick's convert(1). For example, this would work: "xwd | convert fd:0 foo.jpg". Of course, if you have ImageMagick already installed, you'd probably use import(1) instead of xwd.

NOTE3: Xwd files can be viewed using the X Window UnDumper: "xwud <foo.xwd". ImageMagick and The GIMP can also read .xwd files. Strangely, eog(1) cannot.

NOTE4: The sleep is not strictly necessary, I put it in there so that one has time to raise the window above any others before clicking on it.

very handy if you copy or download a/some file(s) and want to know how big it is at the moment

You can use this one-liner for a quick and dirty (more customizable) alternative to the watch command. The keys to making this work: everything exists in an infinite loop; the loop starts with a clear; the loop ends with a sleep. Enter whatever you'd like to keep an eye on in the middle.

when using Gnome or KDE, you will have a hard time getting a screenshot of something like a login screen, or any other screen that occurs before the desktop environment is up and monitoring the printscreen key. (this probably applies for other DEs as well, but I haven't used them)

What this command is meant to do is take a screenshot of an X window using a command you can run from your virtual terminals (actual text terminals, not just an emulator) To do this:

Press CTRL+ALT+F1 to go to a virtual (text) terminal once your login window comes up

Login to the virtual terminal and enter the command (you'll have to type it in)

You should now have a file called screenshot.png in your home directory with your screenshot in it.

For those of you who are new to the virtual terminal thing, you can use CTRL+ALT+F7 to get back to your regular GUI

From http://www.gnome.org

Requires the xautomation package.

[ 2000 -ge "$(free -m | awk '/buffers.cache:/ {print $4}')" ] returns true if less than 2000 MB of RAM are available, so adjust this number to your needs.

[ $(echo "$(uptime | awk '{print $10}' | sed -e 's/,$//' -e 's/,/./') >= $(grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo)" | bc) -eq 1 ] returns true if the current machine load is at least equal to the number of CPUs.

If either of the tests returns true we wait 10 seconds and check again. If both tests return false, i.e. 2GB are available and machine load falls below number of CPUs, we start our command and save it's output in a text file.

The ( ( ... ) & ) construct lets the command run in background even if we log out. See http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3115/ .

this command shows the space used in postgres directory.

the block of the loop is useful whenever you have huge junks of similar jobs, e.g., convert high res images to thumbnails, and make usage out of all the SMP power on your compute box without flooding the system.

note: c is used as counter and the random sleep

is just used as a dummy command.

This will be seen through your system's visual notification system, notify-osd, notification-daemon, etc.

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sleep accepts s,m,h,d and floats (date; sleep .25m; date)

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notify-send (-t is in milliseconds && -u low / normal / critical)

man notify-send for more information

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notification-daemon can use b/i/u/a HTML

The biggest advantage over atoponce's nifty original is not killing the scrollback. Written assuming bash, but shouldn't be terribly difficult to port to other shells. S should be multiple spaces, but I can't get commandlinefu to save/show them properly, any help?

This ran on a ubuntu box using espeak for speaking text with the bash shell. On a mac you should use 'say'. Also you can change your alarm interval and your snooze interval which are currently 8 hours and 1 minute. I would run this via cron yet it's easier to disable if you run it as a command like this :P

Requires figlet. Other than that, this should be portable enough across all the Bourne-compatible shells (sh, bash, ksh, zsh, etc).

Produces a massive number using figlet that counts down the number of seconds for any given minute interval. For example, here's a 4-minute timer:

And a 1-minute timer:

Simple countdown clock that should be quite portable across any Bourne-compatible shell. I used to teach for a living, and I would run this code when it was time for a break. Usually, I would set "MIN" to 15 for a 15-minute break. The computer would be connected to a projector, so this would be projected on screen, front and center, for all to see.

With progress bar.. hahaa this is friggin' kludge

Instead of having someone else read you the Digg headlines, Have OSX do it. Requires Curl+Sed+Say. This could probably be easily modified to use espeak for Linux.

I like much more the perl solution, but without using perl. It launches a backgroup process that will kill the command if it lasts too much.

A bigger function:

check_with_timeout() {

[ "$DEBUG" ] && set -x

COMMAND=$1

TIMEOUT=$2

RET=0

# Launch command in backgroup

[ ! "$DEBUG" ] && exec 6>&2 # Link file descriptor #6 with stderr.

[ ! "$DEBUG" ] && exec 2> /dev/null # Send stderr to null (avoid the Terminated messages)

$COMMAND 2>&1 >/dev/null &

COMMAND_PID=$!

[ "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Background command pid $COMMAND_PID, parent pid $$"

# Timer that will kill the command if timesout

sleep $TIMEOUT && ps -p $COMMAND_PID -o pid,ppid |grep $$ | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill &

KILLER_PID=$!

[ "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Killer command pid $KILLER_PID, parent pid $$"

wait $COMMAND_PID

RET=$?

# Kill the killer timer

[ "$DEBUG" ] && ps -e -o pid,ppid |grep $KILLER_PID | awk '{print $1}' | xargs echo "Killing processes: "

ps -e -o pid,ppid |grep -v PID | grep $KILLER_PID | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

wait

sleep 1

[ ! "$DEBUG" ] && exec 2>&6 6>&- # Restore stderr and close file descriptor #6.

return $RET

}

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 $!