Cron job won't start again after I stopped it? - bash

I wrote a script to run constantly on startup. If for whatever reason the script were to fail, I wrote a second script to check if it has failed, and if so, run the first script again. I then set this second script as a cronjob to run every minute so that it is constantly checking if the first script is alive.
So to test this, I reboot my system. I can see in htop that the first script is running from start up as expected. Good. I kill the process to test the second script. Sure enough, the second script starts the first script again. Still good. I then kill this process, but the second script won't run again now. It still updates a txt file when I manually start the first script, but the second script just doesn't start the first script like it's supposed to. Is it because I killed the cronjob? Restarting the cron service doesn't fix anything though, so I don't know why my second script isn't running again at all.
First script:
#!/bin/bash
stamp=$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M)
timeout 10d tcpdump -i eth0 -s 96 -z gzip -C 10 -w /home/user/Documents/${stamp}
Second script:
#!/bin/bash
echo "not running" > /home/working.txt
if (( $(ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep tcpdump.sh | wc -l) > 0 ))
then
echo "tcpdump is running!!!" > /home/working.txt
else
/usr/local/bin/tcpdump.sh start
fi
Any help?

You would probably be better off running a simple for loop as the main script, and that kicks off the tcpdump script in the background, so something like:
#!/bin/bash
while true; do
if ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep -q tcpdump; then
: tcpdump running OK
else
# tcpdump not running - start it off
nohup /usr/local/bin/firstscript.sh start &
fi
sleep 30
done
This checks that "tcpdump.sh" is in the output of the "ps -ef" command - if it is, then do nothing (note that you must have an actual command between the "then" and "else" - the ":" command, which just takes it s arguments and ignores them, is sufficient). If it isn't running, start the first script in the background. Then sleep 30 seconds and check again. (Yes, I could have inverted the test so that I didn't need an empty "then" arm, but it would have made the code less obvious)
You put this script as the one which starts at boot time.
Edit: Do you really want to check for "tcpdump.sh"? Is that what the first script is actually called? Assuming that you actually want to check for the tcpdump program, you could use:
if pgrep tcpdump; then

Related

Shell script returning non zero value after killing process

I am trying to kill a process using a shell script.Looks shell itself is getting killed in this process. Also I am seeing non zero return value of the script in terminal.
I am running it on Amazon Linux 2 with sudo.
#!/bin/bash
kill -9 $(ps -ef | grep myapp | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}')
I am executing like:
sudo ./myscript.sh
"echo $?" after executing is returning 137 instead of zero. Can someone please help to understand what is going wrong.
Another observation:
if i directly run kill command in my terminal, i.e below command,
kill -9 $(ps -ef | grep myapp | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}')
I see echo $? is returning zero.
Update:
Problem is solved. Name of process I am trying to kill is overlapping with name of my script. Hence grep is returning both the pid's. Both the process are getting killed. Also learnt that better way of doing this by using pkill or using pidof() to get pid.
If you want the exit code of your last-run command to be the exit code for the script, your script must end with exit $? as the last line. Any function before that must also end with the $? so the chain flows to that final line. Otherwise some other exit is taking place.
If the script is being killed along side the application or script you are trying to kill, then your ps and grep work is likely including both in the results. Look at the output of the ps and grep while the script is running. You could add a line prior to your kill line which just shows the output of the ps and greps so you can see what is actually getting killed.
Finally (and I don't think this is the case) if you are trying to end the script after the kill, manually run an exit (again likely using exit $? for the reason stated above) where appropriate within the script.
Hope that helps you get where you are going.

cron script won't reboot as it should

I have a Raspberry Pi connected to a VPN via openvpn. Periodically, the connection drops, so I use the following script:
#!/bin/bash
ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep openvpn
if [ $? -eq 1 ] ; then
/sbin/shutdown -r now
fi
I added it to crontab (using sudo crontab -e), I want the script to be executed every 5 minutes:
*/5 * * * * /etc/openvpn/check.sh
The script doesn't work, but it still seems to be executed every five minutes:
tail /var/log/syslog | grep CRON
gives:
Mar 16 21:15:01 raspberrypi CRON[11113]: (root) CMD (/etc/openvpn/check.sh)
...
Moreover, when I run the script manually with sudo ./check.sh, the Pi reboots just like it should.
I don't really understand what's going on here ?
Edit :
As suggested, I added the full path names and went from rebooting the Pi to restarting openvpn:
#!/bin/bash
if ! /bin/ps -ef | /bin/grep '[o]penvpn'; then
cd /etc/openvpn/
/usr/sbin/openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/config.ovpn
fi
The script still doesn't work, although it runs fine when I execute it myself. The script's permissions are 755, so it should be ok ?
The path name of the script matches the final grep so it finds itself, and is satisfied.
The reason this didn't happen interactively was that you didn't run it with a full path.
This is (a twist on) a very common FAQ.
Tangentially, your script contains two very common antipatterns. You are reinventing pidof poorly, and you are examining $? explicitly. Unless you specifically require the exit code to be 1, you should simply be doing
if ! ps -ef | grep -q '[o]penvpn'; then
because the purpose of if is to run a command and examine its exit code; and notice also the trick to use a regex which doesn't match itself. But using pidof also lets you easily examine just the binary executable's file name, not its path.
I finally understood why the script didn't work. Since it was located under /etc/openvpn, the condition if ! ps -ef | grep -q '[o]penvpn' wouldn't return true because of the script being executed. I noticed it when I changed the crontab line to:
*/5 * * * * /etc/openvpn/check.sh >/home/pi/output 2>/home/pi/erroutput
the output file showed the /etc/openvpn/check.sh script being run.
The script now is:
#!/bin/bash
if ! pidof openvpn; then
cd /etc/openvpn/
/usr/sbin/openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/config.ovpn
fi
and this works just fine. Thank you all.

Terminal Application to Keep Web Server Process Alive

Is there an app that can, given a command and options, execute for the lifetime of the process and ping a given URL indefinitely on a specific interval?
If not, could this be done on the terminal as a bash script? I'm almost positive it's doable through terminal, but am not fluent enough to whip it up within a few minutes.
Found this post that has a portion of the solution, minus the ping bits. ping runs on linux, indefinitely; until it's actively killed. How would I kill it from bash after say, two pings?
General Script
As others have suggested, use this in pseudo code:
execute command and save PID
while PID is active, ping and sleep
exit
This results in following script:
#!/bin/bash
# execute command, use '&' at the end to run in background
<command here> &
# store pid
pid=$!
while ps | awk '{ print $1 }' | grep $pid; do
ping <address here>
sleep <timeout here in seconds>
done
Note that the stuff inside <> should be replaces with actual stuff. Be it a command or an ip address.
Break from Loop
To answer your second question, that depends in the loop. In the loop above, simply track the loop count using a variable. To do that, add a ((count++)) inside the loop. And do this: [[ $count -eq 2 ]] && break. Now the loop will break when we're pinging for a second time.
Something like this:
...
while ...; do
...
((count++))
[[ $count -eq 2 ]] && break
done
ping twice
To ping only a few times, use the -c option:
ping -c <count here> <address here>
Example:
ping -c 2 www.google.com
Use man ping for more information.
Better practice
As hek2mgl noted in a comment below, the current solution may not suffice to solve the problem. While answering the question, the core problem will still persist. To aid to that problem, a cron job is suggested in which a simple wget or curl http request is sent periodically. This results in a fairly easy script containing but one line:
#!/bin/bash
curl <address here> > /dev/null 2>&1
This script can be added as a cron job. Leave a comment if you desire more information how to set such a scheduled job. Special thanks to hek2mgl for analyzing the problem and suggesting a sound solution.
Say you want to start a download with wget and while it is running, ping the url:
wget http://example.com/large_file.tgz & #put in background
pid=$!
while kill -s 0 $pid #test if process is running
do
ping -c 1 127.0.0.1 #ping your adress once
sleep 5 #and sleep for 5 seconds
done
A nice little generic utility for this is Daemonize. Its relevant options:
Usage: daemonize [OPTIONS] path [arg] ...
-c <dir> # Set daemon's working directory to <dir>.
-E var=value # Pass environment setting to daemon. May appear multiple times.
-p <pidfile> # Save PID to <pidfile>.
-u <user> # Run daemon as user <user>. Requires invocation as root.
-l <lockfile> # Single-instance checking using lockfile <lockfile>.
Here's an example of starting/killing in use: flickd
To get more sophisticated, you could turn your ping script into a systemd service, now standard on many recent Linuxes.

Quit less when pipe closes

As part of a bash script, I want to run a program repeatedly, and redirect the output to less. The program has an interactive element, so the goal is that when you exit the program via the window's X button, it is restarted via the script. This part works great, but when I use a pipe to less, the program does not automatically restart until I go to the console and press q. The relevant part of the script:
while :
do
program | less
done
I want to make less quit itself when the pipe closes, so that the program restarts without any user intervention. (That way it behaves just as if the pipe was not there, except while the program is running you can consult the console to view the output of the current run.)
Alternative solutions to this problem are also welcome.
Instead of exiting less, could you simply aggregate the output of each run of program?
while :
do
program
done | less
Having less exit when program would be at odds with one useful feature of less, which is that it can buffer the output of a program that exits before you finish reading its output.
UPDATE: Here's an attempt at using a background process to kill less when it is time. It assumes that the only program reading the output file is the less to kill.
while :
do
( program > /tmp/$$-program-output; kill $(lsof -Fp | cut -c2-) ) &
less /tmp/$$-program-output
done
program writes its output to a file. Once it exits, the kill command uses lsof to
find out what process is reading the file, then kills it. Note that there is a race condition; less needs to start before program exists. If that's a problem, it can
probably be worked around, but I'll avoid cluttering the answer otherwise.
You may try to kill the process group program and less belong to instead of using kill and lsof.
#!/bin/bash
trap 'kill 0' EXIT
while :
do
# script command gives sh -c own process group id (only sh -c cmd gets killed, not entire script!)
# FreeBSD script command
script -q /dev/null sh -c '(trap "kill -HUP -- -$$" EXIT; echo hello; sleep 5; echo world) | less -E -c'
# GNU script command
#script -q -c 'sh -c "(trap \"kill -HUP -- -$$\" EXIT; echo hello; sleep 5; echo world) | less -E -c"' /dev/null
printf '\n%s\n\n' "you now may ctrl-c the program: $0" 1>&2
sleep 3
done
While I agree with chepner's suggestion, if you really want individual less instances, I think this item for the man page will help you:
-e or --quit-at-eof
Causes less to automatically exit the second time it reaches end-of-file. By default,
the only way to exit less is via the "q" command.
-E or --QUIT-AT-EOF
Causes less to automatically exit the first time it reaches end-of-file.
you would make this option visible to less in the LESS envir variable
export LESS="-E"
while : ; do
program | less
done
IHTH

run command in bash and then exit without killing the command

I am attempting to run a couple commands in a bash script however it will hang up on my command waiting for it to complete (which it wont). this script is simply making sure its running.
#!/bin/bash
ps cax | grep python > /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Process is running."
else
echo "Process is not running... Starting..."
python likebot.py
echo $(ps aux | grep python | grep -v color | awk {'print $2'})
fi
Once it gets to the python command it hangs up while the command is being executed. its not till i cntrl c before it gives the pid. is there anyway i can have it run this bash script and exit the bash script once the commands were run (without waiting for them to complete).
In general, if you want to execute a command and not wait for it, you can simply use & as the delimiter rather than ; or a newline. When doing so, the pid of that process is available to the shell in the special variable !. If you want to wait for that process to complete, you can use wait. If you do not wish to wait for it, then simply omit the wait. In your case:
python likebot.py & # Start command asynchronously
echo $! # echo the pid of the most recent asynchronous process
Since it looks like likebot should be always running you might want to consider 'nohup' as well, with a bare & the job is still a child of your login process and will die if that dies.

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