I would like to make tee catch the stderr and log it into a file. A brute force method by let tee listen on both stderr and stdout is okay like cmd 2>&1 | tee -a log But how to make tee catch the stderr only? You can make use of “process substitution” (>(…)) to…
The common rsync commands seems not handle spaces well. For example, rsync -avxP file “user@server:/data/my dir” It reports: rsync: link_stat “/home/zma/file” failed: No such file or directory (2) How to make rsync handle spaces well? You can use the –protect-args option of rsync. $ rsync –protect-args -avxP file “user@server:/data/my dir” What does –protect-args do: -s,…
It is common to make a unique temporary file. How to make a unique temporary file in Bash on Linux safely and quickly? You can use the mktemp program. In the simplest way, tmpfile=$(mktemp) The file will be like /tmp/tmp.j0wD39Mr3b if you do not prefer any meaningful names. You can set the file to your…
I would like to know whether a function, say f1(), has already been defined in Bash. How should I do it? You can use the type -t to get a string of the type of the name: If the -t option is used, type prints a string which is one of alias, keyword, function, builtin,…
It is possible to set an option inside a Bash script such as set -o errexit. But how to do the reverse thing, that is, to unset an option? Change – to + to do the reverse thing of unseting an option in bash. For example, to unset the errexit option set by set -o…
In Bash, ~username gives the username user’s home. However, this does not work for situations where username is in a variable such as ~$user How to get the home directory from the user name in a variable in Bash? You can use this Bash script snippet: userhome=$(eval echo ~$user) Here, $user get evaluated to its…
I have a text file with many lines of text. In Linux, how to sort the lines by their length? You can make use of awk together with the sort program like awk ‘{ print length(), $0 | “sort -n” }’ /path/to/text/file Here, we use awk to calculate the text length and sort -n to…
How to test whether a string $str contains another string $needle in Bash? You can use this piece of Bash script: [[ “$str” == *”$needle”* ]] A usage example: $ str=”abcde hello” $ needle1=”deh” $ needle2=”de hello” $ [[ “$str” == *”$needle1″* ]] && echo “matched” $ [[ “$str” == *”$needle2″* ]] && echo “matched”…
The command using ‘;’ after ‘&’ like ssh host1 hostname &; ssh host2 hostname & Leads to error like bash: syntax error near unexpected token `;’ Why does ; after & lead to unexpected token error in bash on Linux? And what’s the solution? The fix The quick fix is to change your command to…
How (only) to show the size of the directory. LS command may show more trivial infos I don’t need. DU command can do it. DU is “du – estimate file space usage”. Users could use ‘–max-depth=N’ parameter to print the level of information. One example is as follows. $ du -h –max-depth=0 hummer-svn 11G hummer-svn
When you write your master thesis (in Chinese) on windows, you may have following worries. a, Be afraid your master thesis is lost (or can not be accessed) when hard disk/udisk is broken (or something other viruses). b, Keep master thesis availability (7×24) and safety. c, Do not want anyone else to access it before…
The samtools merge can merge bam files while it can not work for sam files. How to merge sam files on Linux? According to the sam format specification, header lines start with @, while alignment lines do not. So you can use grep to merge sam files as follows efficiently. Assume the header is from…
How to cut by multiple spaces in Linux? For example, if I get a string like a b c d where the spaces among the fields are not decided. How to get the four fields a, b, c and d out? Here, we take getting ‘b’ (the 2nd field) as the example. You can first…
When fatal error happened, we’d like to kill the program. How to exit the program in Node.js? You can use: process.exit() Here, “process” is a global process object. exit method ends the process. process.exit([code]) Ends the process with the specified code. If omitted, exit uses the ‘success’ code 0. To exit with a ‘failure’ code:…
How to find out a domain’s MX record for Email on Linux? For example, to find which domain/IP the email to gmail.com is delivered to. You may make use of the host command. The -t option is used to select the query type. type can be any recognized query type: CNAME, NS, SOA, SIG, KEY,…
The NFS server is down. It is reported “Stale NFS file handle”. I tried ‘umount’ and ‘umount -f’. But neither succeeded. # umount /mnt/store umount.nfs: /mnt/store: Stale NFS file handle # umount -f /mnt/store umount.nfs: /mnt/store: Stale NFS file handle How to force umounting the NFS without rebooting the Linux server? I usually have to…
We have 2 static .a libraries and we would like to merge them into a single one for easier usage. How to merge 2 .a libraries to one .a library on Linux? With GNU ar, you can specify the single command-line option -M and control it with a script supplied via standard input, like the…
On my Fedora 20, I find that the system automatically clean up file under /tmp/. This is convenient. However, it cause some problems for some programs. For example, HDFS puts its DataNode pid file under /tmp/ by default like hadoop-hadoop-datanode.pid. After it is cleaned up, the hadoop-daemon.sh script will consider there is no DataNode running….
The problem is like this: I would like to send a GET request using curl and the content has spaces, such as curl “http://example.com/send?msg=hello world” The space and the “world” will be left away if this command is executed directory on Linux. How to encode spaces in curl request URL? You can use the –date-urlencode…
I want to run screen on a remote host on which I do not have root/sudo privilege and screen is not installed. I can compile or copy the screen program that can run on the host. However, it reports: “Cannot make directory ‘/var/run/screen’: Permission denied” As screen is not installed on the host, the directory…