This time I’m bringing you a self-documented cron table file (with an example), that is, a tidy cheatsheet diagram embedded as comments that does just one thing, helps you remember the crontab syntax:

# * * * * * command to be executed
# - - - - -
# | | | | |
# | | | | +—– day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
# | | | +——- month (1 - 12)
# | | +——— day of month (1 - 31)
# | +———– hour (0 - 23)
# +————- min (0 - 59)

# Alarm clock set to 6:30AM
30 6 * * * /home/nano/alarm

I hope you find it useful, thanks for reading and happy May Revolution Day to everyone!

I guess I’m getting too used to the “it’s been a while!” thingy so, awkward title aside, let’s just move straight to today’s post:

The more I learn about AWK, the more I love it. It’s just that simple. I’ve been trying its powers a bit and came with an awk-mazing (and probably useless, but still exciting) five-lines (sans comments) cute script that emulates the most popular feature (the “-e” option) of our good ol’ boy apropos.
Enter lazyman!

#!/bin/bash
#
# lazyman.sh - displays the name section of some program’s man
# page.
#
# DESCRIPTION
# this tiny script shows the NAME section of a given program’s
# manual page, displaying an output quite similar to
# “apropos -e” but directly calling “man” instead of querying
# against “mandb”.
#
params=$(echo $@ | awk ‘END{print NF}’)
case $params in
1) man $1 | awk ‘/NAME/{getline;print}’ ;;
*) echo “usage: lazyman.sh [program]” ;;
esac

That’s all folks! I hope you’ve enjoyed it and thanks for reading!

Hey there! I know it’s been a month since my last post, I’m sorry about that but I’ve been pretty busy this days, having a lot to do at work and also being a full time student, so anyway, this time I’m sharing with you a nifty tip regarding notifications using mailx on UNIX, so without further ado, here’s the actual code:

#!/bin/ksh
#
# mailx settings:
#
to=“someone@somewhere.com”
subject=“[Notification] Something happened.”
body=“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet et cétera.”
#
# run and notify:
#
runSomething && (echo $body | mailx -s “$subject” “$to”)

I hope you find it interesting, thanks much for reading and don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

A couple of days ago I was needing to solve an issue with our EAI framework. The implementation of such framework could be basically described as instances of Java programs running under Solaris, but there’s a particular instance that should be running just once. So I wrote this tiny shell script to avoid launching that program twice:

#!/bin/ksh
#
theProcess=someProcess
if [ $(pgrep -u $USER -f $theProcess | wc -l) -gt 0 ] then
echo “There is an instance of “$theProcess” already running.”
else runTheProcess
fi

someProcess could be any regex that matches the process description,
runTheProcess is whatever command that executes the process.
Okay, that’s all, I hope you’ve found it informative and thanks for reading!

Hello world! Well basically I’m shifting the course of my beloved little blog from just quoting slash reposting or, in a more trendy web 2.0ish lingo, “consuming syndicated content”, to actually authoring my own stuff, that is, in principle, publishing any tip, trick, hack and what have you I happen to consider my audience would be interested in reading (that audience being just my close friends at the moment). Anyway, so without further ado, let’s make it happen! And as a footnote, please be nice with what I like to call “my developing creative writing talent”, I’m no language major, actually I’m not even a native English speaker, but I will do my best to write it all pretty for you guys

Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) is a freely available release of Sun’s next generation Solaris Operating System built from the source code repository at OpenSolaris.org. The release includes the latest tools, technologies, and platforms to create applications for the Solaris OS, Java Application Platforms, and Web 2.0.

Learn More »

Grails is an open-source, rapid web application development framework that provides a super-productive full-stack programming model based on the Groovy scripting language and built on top of Spring, Hibernate, and other standard Java frameworks.

Jason Rudolph is an Application Architect at Railinc, where he develops software that helps keep trains moving efficiently throughout North America.

The book can be downloaded for free (registration required), but also you could always purchase the printed copy.