Check These Out
Run this before you run a command in order to see what the command does as it starts.
The -c flag is useful here as the PID is unknown before startup.
All config files, libraries, logs, ports, etc used by the command as it starts up, (and shuts down) will be captured at 1s intervals and written to a file.
Useful for debugging etc.
# CC with SSN dash ( low false positive only match ###-##-#### not any 8digi number )
$
find . -iname "*.???x" -type f -exec unzip -p '{}' '*' \; | sed -e 's/]\{1,\}>/ /g; s/[^[:print:]]\{1,\}/ /g' | egrep "\b4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?\b|\b5[1-5][0-9]{14}\b|\b6011[0-9]{14}\b|\b3(?:0[0-5]\b|\b[68][0-9])[0-9]{11}\b|\b3[47][0-9]{13}\b|\b[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{4}\b"
$
rmccurdyDOTcom
Useful if you have to tunnel ssh through a local port and it complains of the host key being different. Much easier than manually editing the file.
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.
Tested on debian and ubuntu. Translations could be useless, so "LANG=C man intro" is a better alternative.
My take on the original: even though I like the other's use of -exec echo, sed just feels more natural. This should also be slightly easier to improve.
I expanded this into a script as an exercise, which took about 35 minutes (had to look up some docs): http://bitbucket.org/kniht/nonsense/src/7c1b46488dfc/commandlinefu/quick_image_gallery.py
Here's a way to wait for a file (a download, a logfile, etc) to stop changing, then do something. As written it will just return to the prompt, but you could add a "; echo DONE" or whatever at the end.
This just compares the full output of "ls" every 10 seconds, and keeps going as long as that output has changed since the last interval. If the file is being appended to, the size will change, and if it's being modified without growing, the timestamp from the "--full-time" option will have changed. The output of just "ls -l" isn't sufficient since by default it doesn't show seconds, just minutes.
Waiting for a file to stop changing is not a very elegant or reliable way to measure that some process is finished - if you know the process ID there are much better ways. This method will also give a false positive if the changes to the target file are delayed longer than the sleep interval for any reason (network timeouts, etc). But sometimes the process that is writing the file doesn't exit, rather it continues on doing something else, so this approach can be useful if you understand its limitations.
