prevent output from script in xinetd service - bash

I have a bash script that starts Xvnc after doing some other processing, and it's launched from a xinetd service. However the script indirectly outputs some text to stdout and stderr, which gets sent back to the connecting client.
Is there some way to tell xinetd to ignore any ouput from the script and just let Xvnc take over the connection?
(I assume Xvnc somehow takes over the socket from xinetd, rather than just using stdout to communicate with xinetd?)

Put the following lines into the script at the beginning:
exec >/dev/null
exec 2>/dev/null

Related

SSH command within a script terminates prematurely

From myhost.mydomain.com, I start a nc listener. Then login to another host to start a netcat push to my host:
nc -l 9999 > data.gz &
ssh repo.mydomain.com "cat /path/to/file.gz | nc myhost.mydomain.com 9999"
These two commands are part of a script. Only 32K bytes are sent to the host and the ssh command terminates, the nc listener gets an EOF and it terminates as well.
When I run the ssh command on the command line (i.e. not as part of the script) on myhost.mydomain.com the complete file is downloaded. What's going on?
I think there is something else that happens in your script which causes this effect. For example, if you run the second command in the background as well and terminate the script, your OS might kill the background commands during script cleanup.
Also look for set -o pipebreak which terminates all the commands in a pipeline when one of them returns with != 0.
On a second note, the approach looks overly complex to me. Try to reduce it to
ssh repo.mydomain.com "cat /path/to/file.gz" > data.gz
(ssh connects stdout of the remote with the local). It's more clear when you write it like this:
ssh > data.gz repo.mydomain.com "cat /path/to/file.gz"
That way, you can get rid of nc. As far as I know, nc is synchronous, so the second invocation (which sends the data) should only return after all the data has been sent and flushed.

Buffered pipe in bash

I'm running a Bukkit (Minecraft) server on a Linux machine and I want to have the server gracefully shut down using the server's stop command and the computer suspend at a certain time using pm-suspend from the command line. Here's what I've got:
me#comp~/dir$ perl -e 'sleep [time]; print "stop\\n";' | ./server && sudo pm-suspend
(I've edited by /etc/sudoers so I don't have to enter my password when I suspend.)
The thing is, while the perl -e is sleeping, the server is expecting a constant stream of bytes, (That's my guess. I could be misunderstanding something.) so it prints out all of the nothings it receives, taking up precious resources:
me#comp~/dir$ ...
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>...
Is there any such thing as a buffered pipe? If not, are there any ways to send delayed input to a script?
You may want to have a look at Bukkit's wiki, which recommends an init script for permanently running servers.
This init script uses rather unconventional approach to communicate with running server. The server is started in screen session, then all commands are send to the server console via screen, e.g.
screen -p 0 -S $SCREEN -X eval 'stuff \"stop\"\015'
See https://github.com/Ahtenus/minecraft-init/blob/master/minecraft
This approach suggest that bukkit may be expecting standard input to be attached to a terminal, thus requiring screen wrapper (which is itself terminal emulator) for unattended runs.

how to send ssh job to background

I logged in to a remote server via ssh and started a php script. Appereantly, it will take 17 hours to complete, is there a way to break the connection but the keep the script executing? I didn't make any output redirection, so I am seeing all the output.
Can you stop the process right now? If so, launch screen, start the process and detach screen using ctrl-a then ctrl-d. Use screen -r to retrieve the session later.
This should be available in most distros, failing that, a package will definitely be available for you.
ctrl + z
will pause it. Than type
bg
to send it to background. Write down the PID of the process for later usage ;)
EDIT: I forgot, you have to execute
disown -$PID
where $PID is the pid of your process
after that, and the process will not be killed after you close the terminal.
you described it's important to protect script continuation. Unfortunately I don't know, you make any interaction with script and script is made by you.
continuation protects 'screen' command. your connection will break, but screen protect pseudo terminal, you can reconnect to this later, see man.
if you don't need operators interaction with script, you simply can put script to background at the start, and log complete output into log file. Simply use command:
nohup /where/is/your.script.php >output.log 2&>1 &
>output.log will redirect output into log file, 2&>1 will append error stream into output, effectively into log file. last & will put command into background. Notice, nohup command will detach process from terminal group.
At now you can safely exit from ssh shell. Because your script is out of terminal group, then it won't be killed. It will be rejoined from your shell process, into system INIT process. It is unix like system behavior. Complete output you can monitor using command
tail -f output.log #allways breakable by ^C, it is only watching
Using this method you do not need use ^Z , bg etc shell tricks for putting command to the background.
Notice, using redirection to nohup command is preferred. Otherwise nohup will auto redirect all outputs for you to nohup.out file in the current directory.
You can use screen.

Send command to a background process

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.

Script: SSH command execute and leave shell open, pipe output to file

I would like to execute a ssh command and pipe the output to a file.
In general I would do:
ssh user#ip "command" >> /myfile
the problem is that ssh close the connection once the command is executed, however - my command sends the output to the ssh channel via another programm in the background, therefore I am not receiving the output.
How can I treat ssh to leave my shell open?
cheers
sven
My understanding is that command starts some background process that perhaps will write some output to the terminal later. If command terminates before that the ssh session will be terminated and there will be no terminal for the background program to write to.
One simple and naive solution is to just sleep long enough
ssh user#ip "command; sleep 30m" >> /myfile
A better solution than sleep would be to wait for the background process(es) to finish in some more intelligent way, but that is impossible to say without further details.
Something more powerful than bash would be Python with Paramiko and PyExpect.

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