Relatively often I have to run some command every n seconds, to see what is happening.
To do this I generally resort to writing simple one liner in shell:
=$ while true; do some command; sleep 5; done
Around a month ago I wrote about new pretty-printer for SQL queries that I created.
Today, figured I'll add command line tool for putting queries through it, to make my life a bit easier.
In my work I'm often in situation where I want to restart remote server, and then immediately connect to it over ssh.
This can be done by repeating ssh HOST in shell, but it gets tedious.
I am doing quite a lot of work inside tmux. I especially love that I can start multiple windows/panes and use them to run the same thing across multiple servers, while still having normal shell access between steps.
This thing was greatly improved when I wrote tmux_send_to_many, but one thing was missing – waiting for the thing, running in tmux window to end.
Generally, I had to look at all the windows, and decide when to launch next step on my own.
Not anymore.
I wrote previously about tmux_send_to_many and group_by shell tools that I authored.
Since then I got some more ideas for changes, and for new tool, so figured I'll make an honest git repo for it. Repo is on GitLab, and all the tools inside can be freely used.
While I was doing it, I fixed some things in tmux_send_to_many.
And then – I remembered that for long time I was missing “visual-sleep" type of tool. One that will show some progress information while it's working.
Enter vsleep.
Continue reading visual sleep in shell, and shell_utils repo information
I assume that everyone reading my blog understands GROUP BY clause in SQL.
Lately I've been doing some maintenance work, and found myself in a position that I could really use similar thing in shell.
Tmux is terminal multiplexer. Kinda like old screen, but with much more functionality.
When I work on my servers, it's pretty common that I have to do the same things to multiple servers. To make my life easier I start tmux, and in there start many “windows", each related to work on single server.
I name the windows in a way that let's me quickly find them, without false positives.
For example, if I'd have to upgrade servers db1..db5 then I'd create windows “up-db1" .. “up-db5", and each window would work on single server.
This is already scriptable – let's assume I'd want to show uptime in all of the windows, I can:
tmux lsw -F '#W' | grep -E '^up-db[0-9]+$' | xargs -r -d$'\n' -I% tmux send-keys -t % uptime Enter
But this gets tedious fast.
Continue reading Automation for doing stuff in multiple windows in tmux