Entries Tagged "bash"

A Portable Bash Function to List Process Hierarchies

2 years, 1 month ago — 0 Comments — Permalink

It can be useful to find the process hierarchy of a particular process when diagnosing a problematic machine. Say for instance you run into a rogue program and want to find out what spawned it before you kill it. The Unix command pstree (or ptree on Solaris) will show you a tree of running processes but is not always available.

Since I ran into this problem recently, I concocted the following recursive function to traverse a process tree to its root from a given pid:

parents(){ :(){                                                                                                                       
          read p n <<<`ps -o ppid,comm -p $1 | awk 'NR>1{print $1,$2}'`;
          echo -e "$1\t$n";
          test $1 -ne 0 && : $p; };
      : $1; }

Let’s see it in action:

stevechallis:~$ parents 28311                                                                                                         
28311   /bin/sh
488 /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs
1   /sbin/launchd
0

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Background

2 years, 2 months ago — 1584 Comments — Permalink

Update: An improved version of this script now lives on Github Gist at https://gist.github.com/1144996

NASA have this really neat Astronomy Picture of the Day webpage with some incredible pictures. I thought it’d be neat to set these as my desktop background picture so wrote the following script to accomplish this. It basically downloads the most recent picture to whatever folder you put it in and will wipe the folder whenever run. Adding this to a daily cron and then setting your desktop background to image.jpg should give you a changing picture.

#!/bin/sh
dst=`dirname $0`
base="http://apod.nasa.gov"
rm -rf $dst/*.jpg
wget -qO- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod.rss |
    grep "link" | head -n 1 |
    sed "s/.*<link>\(.*\)<\/link>.*/wget -qO- \1/" | bash - |
    grep "href=\"image" | head -n 1 |
    sed "s;.*\"\(.*\)\".*;wget -O $dst/image.jpg $base/\1;" | bash -

The accompanying crontab entry will be something along the lines of:

0   0   *   *   *   ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/apod/getpic.sh

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A Portable Bash Function to List Process Hierarchies

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Background