source a bash script with anacron - bash

I am learning to automate tasks using anacron by following this anacron guide. My task is to remove the saved ssh keys every day. I know this is possible using the --timeout argument, but I wanted to use a bash script and do it manually.
remove-keys.sh :
SERVICE="ssh-agent"
if pgrep -x "$SERVICE" >/dev/null
then
/usr/bin/ssh-add -D
else
:
fi
anacrontab config:
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
START_HOURS_RANGE=18-20
1 5 remove-keys source $HOME/.local/etc/cron.daily/remove-keys.sh
When I execute source remove-keys.sh, all identities are removed. I have given the necessary file permissions to execute. Anacron syntax test was also successful. I have used source, so the that commands executed in the script are executed as part of the current bash shell (or bash session).
I tested anacron with the following command:
anacron -fn -t $HOME/.local/etc/anacrontab -S $HOME/.var/spool/anacron
But when I look up ssh-add -L, all identities are still present.
What am I doing wrong?
EDIT 1:
Context:
I am using Ubuntu-20.04 on WSL2. Also, I am persisting the identities by using keychain to reuse ssh-agent (this is necessary when using more than one shell at a time). So, technically, the identities have an infinite timeout until I shut down WSL.

The identities in your SSH agent are specific to your login session. I don't think there is a sane way to use ssh-agent from a cron job.
Trying to manipulate your interactive environment from cron seems doomed anyway. It will fail if you are not logged in when the job runs, and have weird failure modes if you are logged in more than once.
Perhaps instead create a simple wrapper script which runs an endless loop with (say) a five-minute sleep between iterations from your desktop environment's login hooks.

Related

fish shell login commands keep running on screen or tmux session after login

I've just switched to fish-shell
And I've used the instructions of How do I run a command every login? What's fish's equivalent to .bashrc?
Which means I've moved the commands which i prefer to run upon login from .bashrc to ~/.config/fish/config.fish
But right now the commands keep running if i open screen or tmux session ! but before while i were using the default shell that's was never happens (meant that the commands were only run during the login and never re-run in screen session)
How to avoid this?
Thanks in advance.
You can test for the TERM environmental variable to see if your shell is running in such a session. Both screen and tmux by default set it to 'screen'.
if not string match --quiet -e $TERM 'screen'
<your startup scripts>
end
Note that other useful indicators are whether a shell is interactive or a login shell. You can use status --is-interactive and status --is-login to check for these two states.
In your specific case, a check for login shell might be what you are looking for:
if status --is-login
<your startup scripts>
end
See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/38175/difference-between-login-shell-and-non-login-shell for an explanation.

How to run shell script on VM indefinitely?

I have a VM that I want running indefinitely. The server is always running but I want the script to keep running after I log out. How would I go about doing so? Creating a cron job?
In general the following steps are sufficient to convince most Unix shells that the process you're launching should not depend on the continued existence of the shell:
run the command under nohup
run the command in the background
redirect all file descriptors that normally point to the terminal to other locations
So, if you want to run command-name, you should do it like so:
nohup command-name >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
This tells the process that will execute command-name to send all stdout and stderr to nowhere (instead of to your terminal) and also to read stdin from nowhere (instead of from your terminal). Of course if you actually have locations to write to/read from, you can certainly use those instead -- anything except the terminal is fine:
nohup command-name >outputFile 2>errorFile <inputFile &
See also the answer in Petur's comment, which discusses this issue a fair bit.

How to ssh into a shell and run a script and leave myself at the prompt

I am using elastic map reduce from Amazon. I am sshing into hadoop master node and executing a script like.
$EMR_BIN/elastic-mapreduce --jobflow $JOBFLOW --ssh < hivescript.sh . It sshes me into the master node and runs the hive script. The hivescript contains the following lines
hive
add jar joda-time-1.6.jar;
add jar EmrHiveUtils-1.2.jar;
and some commands to create hive tables. The script runs fine and creates the hive tables and everything else, but comes back to the prompt from where I ran the script. How do I leave it sshed into hadoop master node at the hive prompt.
Consider using Expect, then you could do something along these lines and interact at the end:
/usr/bin/expect <<EOF
spawn ssh ... YourHost
expect "password"
send "password\n"
send javastuff
interact
EOF
These are the most common answers I've seen (with the drawbacks I ran into with them):
Use expect
This is probably the most well rounded solution for most people
I cannot control whether expect is installed in my target environments
Just to try this out anyway, I put together a simple expect script to ssh to a remote machine, send a simple command, and turn control over to the user. There was a long delay before the prompt showed up, and after fiddling with it with little success I decided to move on for the time being.
Eventually I came back to this as the final solution after realizing I had violated one of the 3 virtues of a good programmer -- false impatience.
Use screen / tmux to start the shell, then inject commands from an external process.
This works ok, but if the terminal window dies it leaves a screen/tmux instance hanging around. I could certainly try to come up with a way to just re-attach to prior instances or kill them; screen (and probably tmux) can make it die instead of auto-detaching, but I didn't fiddle with it.
If using gnome-terminal, use its -x or --command flag (I'm guessing xterm and others have similar options)
I'll go into more detail on problems I had with this on #4
Make a bash script with #!/bin/bash --init-file as the shebang; this will cause your script to execute, then leave an interactive shell running afterward
This and #3 had issues with some programs that required user interaction before the shell is presented to them. Some programs (like ssh) it worked fine with, others (telnet, vxsim) presented a prompt but no text was passed along to the program; only ctrl characters like ^C.
Do something like this: xterm -e 'commands; here; exec bash'. This will cause it to create an interactive shell after your commands execute.
This is fine as long as the user doesn't attempt to interrupt with ^C before the last command executes.
Currently, the only thing I've found that gives me the behavior I need is to use cmdtool from the OpenWin project.
/usr/openwin/bin/cmdtool -I 'commands; here'
# or
/usr/openwin/bin/cmdtool -I 'commands; here' /bin/bash --norc
The resulting terminal injects the list of commands passed with -I to the program executed (no parms means default shell), so those commands show up in that shell's history.
What I don't like is that the terminal cmdtool provides feels so clunky ... but alas.

Simple script run via cronjob doesn't work but works from shell

I am on shared hosting and I'm trying to schedule cronjob to run every now and then. Via cPanel I scheduled to execute my script but even though that according to my host support the cronjob runs, the script doesn't seem as doing anything. The cron job command I set via cPanel is:
/bin/sh /home1/myusername/public_html/somefolder/cronjob2.sh
and the cronjob2.sh
#!/bin/bash
/home1/myusername/public_html/somefolder/node_modules/forever/bin/forever stop 0
when via SSH I execute:
/home1/myusername/public_html/somefolder/cronjob2.sh
it stops forever process as needed. From cronjob doesn't do anything.
How can I get this working?
EDIT:
So I've tried:
/bin/sh /home1/username/public_html/somefolder/cronjob2.sh >> /tmp/mylog 2>&1
and mylog entries say:
/usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory
It seems that forever needs to run node and this cannot be found. How would I possibly fix this?
EDIT2:
Accepted answer at superuser.com. Thank you all for help
https://superuser.com/questions/763261/simple-script-run-via-cronjob-doesnt-work-but-works-from-shell/763288#763288
For cron job lines in a crontab it's not required to specify kind of shell or e.g. of perl.
It's enough, that your script contains
shebang
line.
Therefore you should remove /bin/sh from your cron job line.
Another aspect, that might cause a different behavior of your script by interactive start and by cron daemon start is possible different environment, first of all the PATH variable. Therefore check, if you script is able to be executed in very restricted environment, that is provided by cron daemon. You can determine your cron job environment experimentally by start of temporary cron job, that executes "env" command and writes its output to a file.
Once more aspect: Have you redirected STDOUT and STDERR of the cron job to a log file and read its content to analyze the issue? You can do it as follows:
your_cron_job >/tmp/any_name.log 2>&1
According to what you wrote, when you run your script via SSH, you are using bash, because this line is the first of your script:
#!/bin/bash
However, in the crontab, you are forcing the use of sh instead of bash. Are you sure your script is fully compatible with sh? Otherwise, simply replace /bin/sh with /bin/bash in your cron command and test again.

How to make ssh to kill remote process when I interrupt ssh itself?

In a bash script I execute a command on a remote machine through ssh. If user breaks the script by pressing Ctrl+C it only stops the script - not even ssh client. Moreover even if I kill ssh client the remote command is still running...
How can make bash to kill local ssh client and remote command invocation on Crtl+c?
A simple script:
#/bin/bash
ssh -n -x root#db-host 'mysqldump db' -r file.sql
Eventual I found a solution like that:
#/bin/bash
ssh -t -x root#db-host 'mysqldump db' -r file.sql
So - I use '-t' instead of '-n'.
Removing '-n', or using different user than root does not help.
When your ssh session ends, your shell will get a SIGHUP. (hang-up signal). You need to make sure it sends that on to all processes started from it. For bash, try shopt -s huponexit; your_command. That may not work, because the man page says huponexit only works for interactive shells.
I remember running into this with users running jobs on my cluster, and whether they had to use nohup or not (to get the opposite behaviour of what you want) but I can't find anything in the bash man page about whether child processes ignore SIGHUP by default. Hopefully huponexit will do the trick. (You could put that shopt in your .bashrc, instead of on the command line, I think.)
Your ssh -t should work, though, since when the connection closes, reads from the terminal will get EOF or an error, and that makes most programs exit.
Do you know what the options you're passing to ssh do? I'm guessing not. The -n option redirects input from /dev/null, so the process you're running on the remote host probably isn't seeing SIGINT from Ctrl-C.
Now, let's talk about how bad an idea it is to allow remote root logins:
It's a really, really bad idea. Have a look at HOWTO: set up ssh keys for some suggestions how to securely manage remote process execution over ssh. If you need to run something with privileges remotely you'll probably want a solution that involves a ssh public key with embedded command and a script that runs as root courtesy of sudo.
trap "some_command" SIGINT
will execute some_command locally when you press Ctrl+C . help trap will tell you about its other options.
Regarding the ssh issue, i don't know much about ssh. Maybe you can make it call ssh -n -x root#db-host 'killall mysqldump' instead of some_command to kill the remote command?
What if you don't want to require using "ssh -t" (for those as forgetful as I am)?
I stumbled upon looking at the parent PID, because CTRL/C from the initiating session results in the ssh-launched process on the remote process exiting, although its child process continues. By way of example, here's my script that is on the remote server.
#!/bin/bash
Answer=(Alive Dead)
Index=0
while [ ${Index} -eq 0 ]; do
if ! kill -0 ${PPID} 2> /dev/null ; then Index=1; fi
echo "Parent PID ${PPID} is ${Answer[$Index]} at $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S%Z)" > ~/NowTime.txt
sleep 1
done
I then invoke it with "ssh remote_server ./test_script.sh"
"watch cat ~/NowTime.txt" on the remote server shows the timestamp in the file increasing and declaring that the parent process is alive; once I hit CTRL/C in the launching process, the script on the remote server notes that its parent process has died, and the script exits.

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