I just wrote my first bash script to start some redis instances on a development server. While it is mostly working, the last opened redis instance is blocking the active terminal – though I have the trailing & sign and the other started instances aren't blocking the terminal. How would I push them all to the background?
Here's the script:
#!/bin/bash
REDIS=(6379 6380 6381 6382 6383 6390 6391 6392 6393)
for i in "${REDIS[#]}"
do
:
redis-server --port $i &
done
It sounds like your terminal is not actually blocked, your prompt just got overwritten. It's a purely cosmetic issue. Due to the way terminals work, bash doesn't know to redraw it so it looks like the command is in the foreground.
Run the script again, and blindly type lsEnter. You'll probably see that the shell responds as normal, even though you can't see the prompt.
You can alternatively just hit Enter to get bash to redraw the prompt.
Related
I need to develop a client and server program with using sockets. My program should get port number from the command line. I saw an example which says "myprogram 2454 &".
I wonder what that & (ampersand) means there.
It means to start the process in the background. http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x9644.html so that you may continue to use your shell session to run other programs. You can then use fg to "foreground" your process again.
The ampersand (&) means that you want to run myprogram in background. This is normally used when you want to stay on your command-prompt and continue the work on the same session.
Example
somescript &
will run the somescript shell script in background. You will get the prompt back on the next line. If you run somescript without & then the prompt may not appear back because somescript may take more time.
The best way is to run it in background with no hangups, in which case even of you loose your connection to the host the process keeps running on the UNIX or Linux host.
For example
nohup somescript &
the jobs command will display the jobs running in background.
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.
This hopefully should be an easy question to answer. I am attempting to have mumble-ruby run automatically I have everything up and running except after running this simple script it runs but ends. In short:
Running this from terminal I get "Press enter to terminate script" and it works.
Running this via a cronjob runs the script but ends it and runs cli.disconnect (I assume).
I want the below script to run automatically via a cronjob at a specified time and not end until the server shuts down.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'mumble-ruby'
cli = Mumble::Client.new('IP Address', Port, 'MusicBot', 'Password')
cli.connect
sleep(1)
cli.join_channel(5)
stream = cli.stream_raw_audio('/tmp/mumble.fifo')
stream.volume = 2.7
print 'Press enter to terminate script';
gets
cli.disconnect
Assuming you are on a Unix/Linux system, you can run it in a screen session. (This is a Unix command, not a scripting function.)
If you don't know what screen is, it's basically a "detachable" terminal session. You can open a screen session, run this script, and then detach from that screen session. That detached session will stay alive even after you log off, leaving your script running. (You can re-attach to that screen session later if you want to shut it down manually.)
screen is pretty neat, and every developer on Unix/Linux should be aware of it.
How to do this without reading any docs:
open a terminal session on the server that will run the script
run screen - you will now be in a new shell prompt in a new screen session
run your script
type ctrl-a then d (without ctrl; the "d" is for "detach") to detach from the screen (but still leave it running)
Now you're back in your first shell. Your script is still alive in your screen session. You can disconnect and the screen session will keep on trucking.
Do you want to get back into that screen and shut the app down manually? Easy! Run screen -r (for "reattach"). To kill the screen session, just reattach and exit the shell.
You can have multiple screen sessions running concurrently, too. (If there is more than one screen running, you'll need to provide an argument to screen -r.)
Check out some screen docs!
Here's a screen howto. Search "gnu screen howto" for many more.
Lots of ways to skin this cat... :)
My thought was to take your script (call it foo) and remove the last 3 lines. In your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file (NOTE: this applies to Ubuntu and Fedora, not sure what you're running - but it has something similar) you'd add nohup /path_to_foo/foo 2>&1 > /dev/null& to the end of the file so that it runs in the background. You can also run that command right at a terminal if you just want to run it and have it running. You have to make sure that foo is made executable with chmod +x /path_to_foo/foo.
Use an infinite loop. Try:
while running do
sleep(3600)
end
You can use exit to terminate when you need to. This will run the loop once an hour so it doesnt eat up processing time. An infinite loop before your disconnect method will prevent it from being called until the server shuts down.
I'm trying to use a shell script to start a command. I don't care if/when/how/why it finishes. I want the process to start and run, but I want to be able to get back to my shell immediately...
You can just run the script in the background:
$ myscript &
Note that this is different from putting the & inside your script, which probably won't do what you want.
Everyone just forgot disown. So here is a summary:
& puts the job in the background.
Makes it block on attempting to read input, and
Makes the shell not wait for its completion.
disown removes the process from the shell's job control, but it still leaves it connected to the terminal.
One of the results is that the shell won't send it a SIGHUP(If the shell receives a SIGHUP, it also sends a SIGHUP to the process, which normally causes the process to terminate).
And obviously, it can only be applied to background jobs(because you cannot enter it when a foreground job is running).
nohup disconnects the process from the terminal, redirects its output to nohup.out and shields it from SIGHUP.
The process won't receive any sent SIGHUP.
Its completely independent from job control and could in principle be used also for foreground jobs(although that's not very useful).
Usually used with &(as a background job).
nohup cmd
doesn't hangup when you close the terminal. output by default goes to nohup.out
You can combine this with backgrounding,
nohup cmd &
and get rid of the output,
nohup cmd > /dev/null 2>&1 &
you can also disown a command. type cmd, Ctrl-Z, bg, disown
Alternatively, after you got the program running, you can hit Ctrl-Z which stops your program and then type
bg
which puts your last stopped program in the background. (Useful if your started something without '&' and still want it in the backgroung without restarting it)
screen -m -d $command$ starts the command in a detached session. You can use screen -r to attach to the started session. It is a wonderful tool, extremely useful also for remote sessions. Read more at man screen.
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.