Using file partially for filenames

There are some commands that take file name and there are some case where you need to give file name. But there are some cases where you want to modify the file before passing it to the command. What do you do in these case’s?

I had a file containing huge amount of data and for some testing I wanted to pass only the first few lines of the file and not the complete file.  And since the file only accepted filename and would not take any input from the STDIN so only option was to create a file with the required data in a temporary file. So, I sat back to figure out some way to do it and finally found I can use this:

better bash debugging

I was trying to debug some bash scripts yesterday and learnt something new 😉
There are lot of things in bash that you can use to debug and to start with you can enable xtrace mode as follows:

set -x

With this set you will see that all the commands are printed along with all other information as they are executed.
This you can do for any line or for the function or for the whole script. Once you set the option you can turn it
off with

bash completion

I was working on some functions in bash to make my life easier and realized that if I added custom completion to my functions, it will be really good. So I headed over to google and searched for what I wanted. I did get a lot of information on bash completion but not a single concrete example that could help me do what I wanted. So, with the help of man pages and some results from the Google pages, I was finally able to accomplish what I wanted. So here it is:

faster bash operations on files with File Descriptors.

I was writing a bash script that would do some operations and read and write to file. Seems that that was pretty simple with

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      while read line<br /> <br /> do<br /> <br /> done<file
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

and then use redirection operations like “>” and “»” to write to file. Done with the script pretty fast. So far so good, when I went for real life tests, no one was interested in using it, why? Simple, it was simply taking too long. The file was reading about 10K lines and writing about 50 lines and was taking about more than 10 minutes.

Unix shell script for removing duplicate files

The following shell script finds duplicate (2 or more identical) files and outputs a new shell script containing commented-out rm statements for deleting them (copy-paste from here):

::: updated on 02 May 20121, seems like wordpress did not like it so well so reformatting the code :::::::

#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE:  a.sh
#
#         USAGE:  ./a.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION:
#
#       OPTIONS:  ---
#  REQUIREMENTS:  ---
#          BUGS:  ---
#         NOTES:  ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka), amit.agarwal@roamware.com
#       COMPANY: blog.amit-agarwal.co.in
#       CREATED: 02/05/12 06:52:08 IST
# Last modified: Wed May 02, 2012  07:03AM
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

OUTF=rem-duplicates.sh;
echo "#!/bin/sh" >$OUTF;
find "$@" -type f -exec md5sum {} \; 2>/dev/null | sort --key=1,32 | uniq -w 32 -d |cut -b 1-32 --complement |sed 's/^/rm -f/' >>$OUTF

Pretty good one line, I must say 🙂

Terminating a SSH session after starting background process.

This is too good. If you are planning to start a background process in the bash script in the background and continue in the script, you cannot do it until…….

You would need to close the stdout/stdin and stderr before you can terminate any ssh session automatically. Here’s some more light on this topic.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/09/msg00254.html

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 05:33:28PM -0400, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: > I occasionally log into a machine remotely and start a process in the > background: > > command & > > However, when I log out of the machine, the ssh process on my local > machine blocks. I guess that it is becuase the remote still has jobs > running. Is there a way to get it start the process in the background > and then detach from the shell? I have already tried this:

cd across parallel directories

Here is a simple and fast way to cd across parallel directory.

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      cd ${PWD/test/actual}
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

Related articles

• Linux command line tips: wget (ghacks.net)
• Article Directory Submissions (tjantunen.com)
• Article Directory Submissions (cash-bandit.com)
• Create a repository from your fedora DVD (annupandey.wordpress.com)