Category: shell scripting

Re: The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace

I saw an interesting article on The Universe of Discourse about The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace. I’m about thirty-five years into Unix shell programming now, and I continue to despise it. The shell’s treatment of whitespace is a constant problem. The fact that for i in *.jpg; do cp $i /tmp done […]

sla: The Simple Little Automator

I’m tired of using Make and its arcane syntax. 90% of the projects I write or deal with don’t require any kind of incremental compilation, but that’s all any build system talks about. That, and how insanely fast it is. The drawback is usually that you need to install several terabytes of dependencies, and then […]

multi-git-status can now do a “git fetch” for each repo.

Just a quick note: My multi-git-status project can now do a “git fetch” for each repo, before showing the status. This fetches the latest changes in the remote repository (without changing anything in your local checked out branch), so that mgitstatus will also show any “git pull”s you’d have to do. 

How to solve RPMs created by Alien having file conflicts

I generate release packages for my software with Alien, which amongst other things converts .deb packages to .rpm. On Fedora 24 however, the generated RPMs cause a small problem when installed with Yum: Transaction check error: file / from install of cfgtrack-1.0-2.noarch conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.2-20.el7.x86_64 file /usr/bin from install of cfgtrack-1.0-2.noarch conflicts […]

Multi-repo Git status checking script

I’ve got a whole bunch of Git repositories in my ~/Projects/ directory. All of those may have unstaged, uncommitted or unpushed changes. I find this hard to keep track of properly, so I wrote a script to do this for me. The output looks like this: As you can see, it shows: Untracked files: File that […]

cfgtrack: A simpel tool that tracks and reports diffs in files between invocations.

Sometimes other people change configurations on machines that I help administer. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know when they changed something or what they changed. There are many tools available to track configuration changes, but most are way overpowered. As a result they require too much time to set up and configure properly. All I want is […]

Alien Deb to RPM convert fails with error: “Use of uninitialized value in split…” [FIXED]

TL;DR: Run alien under the script tool. I was trying to get my build server to build packages for one of my projects. One step involves converting a Debian package to a RPM by means of the Alien tool. Unfortunately it failed with the following error: alien -r -g ansible-cmdb-9.99.deb Warning: alien is not running as root! […]

Batch create new users on Linux

A while ago I had to create many new users on a Linux machine. Since I’m lazy, I opted to automate this process. The newusers command combined with pwgen (to generate new passwords) was the solution. First I installed pwgen, a utility to automatically generate passwords: $ sudo apt-get install pwgen I created a file […]

I’ve released cfgtrack v1.0: Get notified of changes on your server

I needed a simple way of being notified when configuration files had been changed on some servers. Nothing fancy. No configuration management, no intrusion detection, no centralised versioning control repositories. Just a simple email saying what’s been changed. I couldn’t find a tool that did just that, and didn’t require massive amounts of configuration, so I […]

Script to start a Chrome browser with an SSH Socks5 proxy

Socks5 proxies are great. They allow you to tunnel all traffic for applications that support Socks proxies through the proxy. One example I frequently use is starting a Chrome window that will do everthing as if it was an a remote machine. This is especially useful to bypass firewalls so you can test websites that […]

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