Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with shellscript

I can haz sitemap?

fvox13 — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:59:40 -0800

How can I print the directory structure of my website? I've seen this question, and mine is similar, except I would like to do it over an FTP connection, if possible.

I work on the web team for a small, liberal-arts college. Our site has gotten unmanageably large, and we would like to create an *actual* sitemap (we have a sitemap, but the actual server has much much more than it technically should). I've considered just FTPing the whole site to a local machine, and running the dos TREE command, but it doesn't sort alphabetically, and we're talking about FTPing a LOT of stuff (like, it would take a day or so to do the transfer).

The site is running on IIS6 on a Win2K3 box (I know, I know...) so I can't really take advantage of some of the unix commands designed to do specifically what I want. And I don't believe TREE ships with Win2K3 (and even if it did, I can't use it, since it doesn't sort alphabetically).

What are my options here?

Scripting the parallel execution of a tedious task

pmbuko — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:03:01 -0800

Calling all shell script gurus! Help me write a command that performs an action on items in a list in parallel (as opposed to sequentially). I am trying to write a command that zeroes out the data on any number of attached disks simultanously (or nearly so). I started with the basics and have written the script below that accomplishes the task sequentially. (This is in Mac OS X, bash shell):



diskutil list | grep /disk | grep -v disk0 | sed 's|/dev/||g' | \

while read DISK; do

diskutil zeroDisk $DISK

done

The first line returns a list of attached disks:
disk1
disk2
disk3
etc... all except disk0.

Nothing I care about resides on any disk but disk0, which is why it's excluded. The while loop executes the 'diskutil zerodisk' command on each item in the list. I can manually start this command on each disk and the computer will happily perform the tasks in parallel. How can I script the parallel execution of this task?

bash bash bash

provolot — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 13:03:24 -0800

Calling all bash/nix gurus.. please help me! I have a list of users that I'm trying to parse and convert into a html-friendly format, surrounding them around <option> tags so I can put them in an HTML select form.

I'm getting input from /etc/passwd, grepping to find users that are enabled login, cutting and getting the first segment before a colon, and sorting in alphabetical order -- then surrounding the resulting list of login IDs in option tags:

cat /etc/passwd | egrep "\[N?U" | cut -d : -f 1 | sort | sed -n 's/.*/<option value=\"&\">&<\/option>

Which yields:
<option value="loginID1"\>loginID1</option\>
,etc.

That's all fine, not a problem. But -- now I want to run each ID through 'lookup' and grep the name out, and then insert between the option tags, where the second ampersand is, like this:

<option value="loginID1">Firstname Lastname1</option>

Assuming that lookup loginID1 returns Firstname Lastname 1, how can I do this? It seems that I need to keep the original values of the /etc/password - parsed values while also running them through lookup. Is there any way I can do this in one line, without having to resort to loops/arrays in bash? Or will an in-line Perl script help?

Thanks!

Make my Mac beep me when it's finished.

AmbroseChapel — Thu, 11 May 2006 03:59:27 -0800

Help me make my other Mac, in the other room, beep me when an app has finished what it's doing. I have two Macs. The one in the living room is for browsing. The other one, down the hall, is where I do things like burning DVDs. It's not online.

So, if burning a DVD takes 20 minutes or so, I forget about it. A couple of hours later I remember and start burning the next one. So about an hour's work can take all day. And I can't be forever walking down the hall to see how it's going.

So, there must be some way I can run a script which monitors ps or top or something, right?

Every minute it could check and if Disk Utility's CPU usage was at 0.00%, then it's finished. And the computer would start quietly beeping. There's still some BELL character you can print to make it beep, right? Am I going to have problems with false positives, readings of zero for a split second?

For all I know there's actually shiny-GUI software which will do this, but I've never heard of it and can't think how to search. And I don't need it. I'll happily start the app, then type

beepwhenfinished 'Disk Utility'

or something.