I am looking for an alternative to something like ssh user#node1 uptime && ssh user#node2 uptime, where both of the SSH-commands are run simultaneosly. As they are both blocking until the command returns, && and ; between them don't work.
My goal is to run infinite while loops on both nodes via SSH. So the first one would never return, and the second one would never be run. I would then like to save the output after terminating the loops with Ctrl+C to a log-file and read that one via Python.
Is there an easy solution to this?
Thanks in advance!
Capturing SSH output
On the one hand, you need to capture the ssh output/error and store it into a file so that you can process it afterwards with Python. To this purpose you can:
1- Store output and error directly into a file
ssh user#node cmd 2>&1 > session.log
2- Show output/error in the console while storing it into a file (I would recommend this one)
ssh user#node cmd 2>&1 | tee session.log
Check this for further information about the tee command.
Running commands in parallel
On the other hand, you want to run both commands in parallel and block the current bash process. You can achieve this by:
1- Blocking the current bash process until their childs are done.
cmd1 & ; cmd2 & ; wait
Check this for further information about the wait command.
2- Spawning the child processes and freeing the current bash process. Notice that the processes will be kept alive although the main process ends.
nohup cmd & ; nohup cmd &
The whole thing
I would recommend combining both approaches using tee (so you can still see the ssh outputs on your terminal) and blocking the current process until everything is done (so that when you kill the main process all the processes are killed too).
ssh user#node1 uptime 2>&1 | tee session1.log & ; ssh user#node2 uptime 2>&1 | tee session2.log & ; wait
Related
The problem with each command is that it has a continuous output that does not allow me to execute any more commands. Each command can only be stopped by pressing CTRL+C or killing the session. Executing 1 command per terminal window works but is time consuming and inefficient. This question is in relation to VLC application that outputs video status information until killed. Seeing output from each command is not necessary.
As mentioned by Doon, & (to background the process) will do the trick.
However, the process will die if you close the terminal. If you want the backgrounded process not to die if you close the terminal it was started in, you can prefix the process with nohup.
Extended from example above:
nohup command1 > /dev/null 2>&1 &;
nohup command2 > /dev/null 2>&1 &;
...
I want to write a bash script that will continue to run if the user is disconnected, but can be aborted if the user presses Ctrl+C.
I can solve the first part of it like this:
#!/bin/bash
cmd='
#commands here, avoiding single quotes...
'
nohup bash -c "$cmd" &
tail -f nohup.out
But pressing Ctrl+C obviously just kills the tail process, not the main body. Can I have both? Maybe using Screen?
I want to write a bash script that will continue to run if the user is disconnected, but can be aborted if the user presses Ctrl+C.
I think this is exactly the answer on the question you formulated, this one without screen:
#!/bin/bash
cmd=`cat <<EOF
# commands here
EOF
`
nohup bash -c "$cmd" &
# store the process id of the nohup process in a variable
CHPID=$!
# whenever ctrl-c is pressed, kill the nohup process before exiting
trap "kill -9 $CHPID" INT
tail -f nohup.out
Note however that nohup is not reliable. When the invoking user logs out, chances are that nohup also quits immediately. In that case disown works better.
bash -c "$cmd" &
CHPID=$!
disown
This is probably the simplest form using screen:
screen -S SOMENAME script.sh
Then, if you get disconnected, on reconnection simply run:
screen -r SOMENAME
Ctrl+C should continue to work as expected
Fact 1: When a terminal (xterm for example) gets closed, the shell is supposed to send a SIGHUP ("hangup") to any processes running in it. This harkens back to the days of analog modems, when a program needed to clean up after itself if mom happened to pick up the phone while you were online. The signal could be trapped, so that a special function could do the cleanup (close files, remove temporary junk, etc). The concept of "losing your connection" still exists even though we use sockets and SSH tunnels instead of analog modems. (Concepts don't change; all that changes is the technology we use to implement them.)
Fact 2: The effect of Ctrl-C depends on your terminal settings. Normally, it will send a SIGINT, but you can check by running stty -a in your shell and looking for "intr".
You can use these facts to your advantage, using bash's trap command. For example try running this in a window, then press Ctrl-C and check the contents of /tmp/trapped. Then run it again, close the window, and again check the contents of /tmp/trapped:
#!/bin/bash
trap "echo 'one' > /tmp/trapped" 1
trap "echo 'two' > /tmp/trapped" 2
echo "Waiting..."
sleep 300000
For information on signals, you should be able to man signal (FreeBSD or OSX) or man 7 signal (Linux).
(For bonus points: See how I numbered my facts? Do you understand why?)
So ... to your question. To "survive" disconnection, you want to specify behaviour that will be run when your script traps SIGHUP.
(Bonus question #2: Now do you understand where nohup gets its name?)
I have a previously running process (process1.sh) that is running in the background with a PID of 1111 (or some other arbitrary number). How could I send something like command option1 option2 to that process with a PID of 1111?
I don't want to start a new process1.sh!
Named Pipes are your friend. See the article Linux Journal: Using Named Pipes (FIFOs) with Bash.
Based on the answers:
Writing to stdin of background process
Accessing bash command line args $# vs $*
Why my named pipe input command line just hangs when it is called?
Can I redirect output to a log file and background a process at the same time?
I wrote two shell scripts to communicate with my game server.
This first script is run when computer start up. It does start the server and configure it to read/receive my commands while it run in background:
start_czero_server.sh
#!/bin/sh
# Go to the game server application folder where the game application `hlds_run` is
cd /home/user/Half-Life
# Set up a pipe named `/tmp/srv-input`
rm /tmp/srv-input
mkfifo /tmp/srv-input
# To avoid your server to receive a EOF. At least one process must have
# the fifo opened in writing so your server does not receive a EOF.
cat > /tmp/srv-input &
# The PID of this command is saved in the /tmp/srv-input-cat-pid file
# for latter kill.
#
# To send a EOF to your server, you need to kill the `cat > /tmp/srv-input` process
# which PID has been saved in the `/tmp/srv-input-cat-pid file`.
echo $! > /tmp/srv-input-cat-pid
# Start the server reading from the pipe named `/tmp/srv-input`
# And also output all its console to the file `/home/user/Half-Life/my_logs.txt`
#
# Replace the `./hlds_run -console -game czero +port 27015` by your application command
./hlds_run -console -game czero +port 27015 > my_logs.txt 2>&1 < /tmp/srv-input &
# Successful execution
exit 0
This second script it just a wrapper which allow me easily to send commands to the my server:
send.sh
half_life_folder="/home/jack/Steam/steamapps/common/Half-Life"
half_life_pid_tail_file_name=hlds_logs_tail_pid.txt
half_life_pid_tail="$(cat $half_life_folder/$half_life_pid_tail_file_name)"
if ps -p $half_life_pid_tail > /dev/null
then
echo "$half_life_pid_tail is running"
else
echo "Starting the tailing..."
tail -2f $half_life_folder/my_logs.txt &
echo $! > $half_life_folder/$half_life_pid_tail_file_name
fi
echo "$#" > /tmp/srv-input
sleep 1
exit 0
Now every time I want to send a command to my server I just do on the terminal:
./send.sh mp_timelimit 30
This script allows me to keep tailing the process on your current terminal, because every time I send a command, it checks whether there is a tail process running in background. If not, it just start one and every time the process sends outputs, I can see it on the terminal I used to send the command, just like for the applications you run appending the & operator.
You could always keep another open terminal open just to listen to my server server console. To do it just use the tail command with the -f flag to follow my server console output:
./tail -f /home/user/Half-Life/my_logs.txt
If you don't want to be limited to signals, your program must support one of the Inter Process Communication methods. See the corresponding Wikipedia article.
A simple method is to make it listen for commands on a Unix domain socket.
For how to send commands to a server via a named pipe (fifo) from the shell see here:
Redirecting input of application (java) but still allowing stdin in BASH
How do I use exec 3>myfifo in a script, and not have echo foo>&3 close the pipe?
You can use the bash's coproc comamnd. (avaliable only in 4.0+) - it's like ksh's |&
check this for examples http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/keywords/coproc
you can't send new args to a running process.
But if you are implementing this process or its a process that can take the args from a pipe, then the other answer would help.
I ssh to another server and run a shell script like this nohup ./script.sh 1>/dev/null 2>&1 &
Then type exit to exit from the server. However it just hangs. The server is Solaris.
How can I exit properly without hanging??
Thanks.
I assume that this script is a long running one. In this case you need to detach the process from the terminal that you wish to close when you terminate your ssh session.
Actually you already done most of the work by reassigning both stdout and stderr to /dev/null, however you didn't do that for stdin.
I used the test case of:
ssh localhost
nohup sleep 10m &> /dev/null &
^D
# hangs
While
ssh localhost
nohup sleep 10m &> /dev/null < /dev/null &
^D
# exits
I second the recommendation to use the excellent gnu screen, that will do this service for you, among others.
Oh, and have you considered running the script directly and not within a shell? I.e.:
ssh user#host script.sh
If you're trying to leave a command running remotely after you close your SSH link, I strongly recommend you use screen and learn to detach the screen. That's much better than leaving background processes around; it also lets you reconnect and see what the process is up to.
Since you haven't provided us with script.sh, I don't think we can know for sure why the command is hanging.
You can use the command :
~.
This command close the ssh session.
sh -c ./script.sh &
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.