misc stuff I will find another place for¶

Using sudo and not root¶

I am a very bad boy and have a tendancy to just use root to get things done quick. This very nicely phrased page on why you should never login as root tells me off.

in short

sudoers is there for audit purposes and audit is half of security.
use sudo sh -c “echo foo >> /etc/bar”

this gets around the problem that sudo echo foo >> /etc/bar is two commands

passwords¶

/etc/passwd is a bit long in the tooth. /etc/master.passwd is where the action is now kept. if you look at that and need to, for example, change the login shell you need to run pwd_mkdb /etc/master.passwd afterwords

Setting Bash prompt¶

You need to set the environment variable PS1. The simplest approach is the best here I feel.:

PS1="\[\033[0;36m\][\$(date +%H:%M)][\u@\h:\w]$\[\033[0m\] ";export PS1

We set the PS1 variable. If we had used

PS1="$ "

Then our prompts would be a boring but functional

$ ls -l

But instead we are being hopefully a little cleaner. OK

\[\033[0;36m\]
^^^^^^^     ^^
always needed to *wrap* any thing we want to pass to terminal, but not print.  In this case, the command 0;36m which sets the terminal colour to be magenta (not bold).   Later on we set the terminal colour to be 0m, or back to defaults.

biblio:	http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x329.html

Colours under Bash¶

Oh yes, please. Just type ls -G (or like above, alias it.) This is great, right up to the point that the cool green on black screen you have tries to show you all your directories in a dark blue. I know I am getting old but taht is unreadable.

So ...

in ~/.bash_profile:

CLICOLOR=1; export CLICOLOR
LSCOLORS='gxfxcxdxbxegedabagacad'; export LSCOLORS

CLICOLOR is the equivalent of ls -G but always set. LSCOLORS is a string of 11 pairs, so gx is foreground-magenta, background-default, and the first pair is how to display a directory in ls (hence LSCOLORS). See the man page for details, but suffice to say gx gives me readble directory names now.

Note that in Linux, the environment variable is LS_COLORS, and its ‘ls –colors’. However this is BSD world (mac included!).

Escape sequences etc etc

Here is a PS1 setting:

export PS1="\[\033[0;36m\][\u@\h:\W]$\[\033[0m\] "

ESC is ANSI 27 033 is the octal representation of ESC 0x1B is HEX e is whatever

We want this not to be interpreted by shell so

echo "\033[H\033[2J"

will not work. But:

printf "\033[H\033[2J"

will (its clear screen btw).:

tput cl

tput cl | less

tput is the command to execute escape sequences. DOnt worry.

So we can look up escape sequences in tables (wikiepdia) and build our own

"\[\033[0;36m\][\u@\h:\W]$\[\033[0m\] "

leftsquarebracket, Escape code (^[), blue colour, username@host:pwd$ reset to defaults/

gives:

[pbrian@hadrian:pbrian]$

biblio:	http://www.bigsoft.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/04/11/configuring-ls_colors http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2897/clicolor-and-ls-colors-in-bash

Temperature¶

$ sysctl hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.temperature hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.temperature: 54.0C

scp¶

Very useful in all respects but wildcards are a bugger

$ scp *.txt myremotesvr:/tmp/misc

will copy all txt file in local dir to remote server. Thats because the shell expands the commands you give it before it passes the commands to the program (scp). Normally thats good (in other words the shell took *.txt and actually sent the scp program

$ scp a.txt b.txt c.txt myremotesvr:/tmp/misc

however:

$ scp myremotesvr:/tmp/misc/*.txt ./

fails. It is trying to send

$ scp myremotesvr:/tmp/misc/a.txt  b.txt c.txt ./

and it is invalid.

So to solve the problem, escape the wildcard, the shell will not expand it but will ‘unescape’ and pass it to the program as we want:

$ scp myremotesvr:/tmp/misc/\*.txt ./

mirroring with wget¶

wget -m -k -K -E http://url/of/web/site

emacs and sudo¶

Annoyingly, if I run

sudo emacs /etc/rc.conf

sudo runs emacs, but the permissions granted by sudo do not carry over to my emacs session, making it not possible to edit the locked down file.

## tramp opens a subshell and then usually allows editing over ssh. it is useful ## for sudo too. C-c C-f /sudo::/my/path/file (require ‘tramp)

emacs and annoying cut paste issues¶

http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

sort and sed and uniq¶

An interesting one from Dru Lavigne’s little nuggets of wisdom

pbrian@delli7 Desktop$ pkg_info | sort | sed -e 's/-[0-9].*$//' | uniq -c | egrep -v '\ *1'
autoconf
automake
font-adobe
font-adobe-utopia
font-bh
font-bh-lucidatypewriter
font-bitstream
glib
gtk
xorg-fonts
pbrian@delli7 Desktop$ pkg_info | sort | sed -e 's/-[0-9].*$//' | uniq -c | grep -v '^[[:space:]]*1'
autoconf
automake
font-adobe
font-adobe-utopia
font-bh
font-bh-lucidatypewriter
font-bitstream
glib
gtk
xorg-fonts

Quick discussion - we get pkg_info sending us things like

zip-3.0             Create/update ZIP files compatible with pkzip

We use sed to remove everything from the first -Numeral
sed -e “s for substitute / this / for that /”
Then uniq -c gives each word and a count of the occurances
then grep -v to weed out anything that only occurs once.

Nice example showing a lot of the standard goodies on the command line.

Also interesting is the grep [[:space:]] - but I find ‘’ more readable

Restart networking in FreeBSD¶

$ /etc/rc.d/netif restart && /etc/rc.d/routing restart

biblio:	href=”http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/freebsd-how-to-start-restart-stop-network-service.html“

More emacs

  find /usr/local/share/emacs/ -iname '*.el'

Where the 'builtin' files are kept - but cannot see rst.el Thats because rst
is now 'builtin' to the emacs, so its supplied compiled, and need search for
.elc

Rest mode in emacs

It has a really horrible highlight the text of each header. With a dark background its distracting and unreadable. SO we get rid of it.

in .emacs file
```
'(rst-level-face-base-light 0)
```

Red output on StdErr on terminal¶

http://superuser.com/questions/28869/immediately-tell-which-output-was-sent-to-stderr put this in .basdh_profile:

# Red STDERR
# rse <command string>
function rse()
{
   # We need to wrap each phrase of the command in quotes to preserve arguments that contain whitespace
   # Execute the command, swap STDOUT and STDERR, colour STDOUT, swap back
   ((eval $(for phrase in "$@"; do echo -n "'$phrase' "; done)) 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3 | sed -e "s/^\(.*\)$/$(echo -en \\033)[31;1m\1$(echo -en \\033)[0m/") 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3
}

then you can run

rse mycommand.sh

or

command.sh | rse

and stderr will print in red.