Tape Format Script for Tape Pickup

The other day my co-worker showed me how to send our tapes offsite. Apparently you need to format the list of tapes in a certain way. So you can input the info to the Iron Mountain site for pickup. He was going though several steps to change the format in Excel. I told myself there has to be a better way, so wrote a script shown below.

First you need to put all the tapes in a list. I put the tape list in the file called list shown in the example below. Then I run the script, I created (tape-input.sh). I take the output and paste it into the web portal.


list

U00010L5
U00011L5
U00012L5
U00013L5
U00014L5
U00015L5
U00016L5
U00017L5
U00018L5
U00019L5
U00020L5
U00021L5
U00022L5
U00023L5
U00024L5
U00025L5
U00026L5
U00027L5
U00028L5
U00029L5
U00030L5 CAT

tape-input.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Created to format the tapes numbers to add to the web portal
echo -e "Packaged by man, $(date|awk '{print $2" "$3" "$6}')"

cat list |sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/, /g'| perl -pe 's{,}{++$n % 3 ? $& :"\n"}ge'

man@earth> ./tape-input.sh
Packaged by man, Dec 13 2018
U00010L5, U00011L5, U00012L5
U00013L5, U00014L5, U00015L5
U00016L5, U00017L5, U00018L5
U00019L5, U00020L5, U00021L5
U00022L5, U00023L5, U00024L5
U00025L5, U00026L5, U00027L5
U00028L5, U00029L5, U00030L5 CAT

I take the output and paste it into the Iron Mountain web portal for pickup.

I hope this helps someone out. If you have any questions please ask below.

Six Fee Computer Books

I like getting free stuff, so when I got and email from Jason Cannon and his website Linux Training Academy I had to share it. Jason Cannon is offering six of his books for free through Amazon.com until this Saturday. To get the books you need an Amazon account with the US or UK store. The books are in the kindle format, which can be read on your computer or tablet if you don't have a kindle.

These books are absolutely free! Just click on the book to download it from Amazon's US store. Use this link for Amazon's UK store.



Prices of the print versions
$24.99   Linux for Beginners
$24.99   Linux Administration
$14.99   Shell Scripting
$14.99   Command Line Kung Fu
$19.99   High Availability for the LAMP Stack
$24.99   Python Programming for Beginners
$124.94 Total savings

I found out about this because I'm on a mailing list that Jason Cannon and his site put out. Further instructions on how to get the free books can be found on his website.

If your looking for more free books checkout my other posts:
Free Python Books
Free Books

Remotely Login & Run Commands on ILOMs

Logging into Oracle's Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) to get info can be a real pain, so I wrote this script to do it for me. Normally one would use use Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), but due to security concerns I was not able to use either of these options. Even with the latest firmware installed the ILOMs would not support modern security practices. So I was forced to find anther way. I needed to write a script that would wait for a prompt and then fill it in for me. Expect an extension to the Tcl scripting language is great for this kind of stuff, but I decided to use HERE which is even easier.

In order to make this work I created the user mancnt on the local system and on all the ILOMs. I also created a SSH key and setup an SSH agent on the local system and then I copied the key over to the ILOMs. If you don't know how to setup SSH keys check out my last post on how to do it  "A Better Way to Setup SSH Keys". You will also need a file containing the hostnames of the ILOMs you want access. In the example script below I use two such files, lsILOMb and lsILOMc, one for the blades and one for the chassis.

#!/bin/bash
#
# This section is for the ILOM blades
 HERE-ILOM(){
ssh $1 2>/dev/null <show /SP/network macaddress
HERE
}
# This section is for the ILOM Chassis
HERE-ILOMc(){
ssh $1 2>/dev/null <show /CMM/network macaddress
HERE
} 

# To get IP address from hostname
Ping-to-IP(){
ping -c1 $1 |grep PING|awk '{print $3}'|sed -e 's/(//' -e 's/)//'
}

# Main section
ps aux|grep manacnt|grep -v grep |grep agent &>/dev/null || echo "Need to have an agent running"

# Section for ILOMs on Oracle Blades
for s in $(cat lsILOMb)
do echo -e "$(Ping-to-IP $s),$(HERE-ILOM $s),Embedded Linux,$s"
done

# Section for ILOMs on Oracle Chassis
for s in $(cat lsILOMc)
do echo -e "$(Ping-to-IP $s),$(HERE-ILOMc $s),Embedded Linux,$s,FALSE,ILOM,N611"
done

So the script generates a comma-separated values (CVS) file, which contains the IP address, MAC address, OS, and hostname. I then give this file to the network security people.

Example output: 10.0.1.20,00:10:e0:40:c2,Embedded Linux,server-ilom

If you have any questions feel free to ask them below.

Turn a list into a CSV file

Hello today I'm showing you two simple ways to turn a list into a comma separated (CSV) output. This is helpful if you need to import the output into a spreadsheet. You can do this one of two ways, with a BASH for loop or with SED.

We are going to use list.txt which is a small list of solar objects for this example. 

list.txt

earth
moon
mars
venus
saturn

BASH Script

for s in $(cat list.txt)
do echo -en "$s, "
done

-note - if you don't want spaces or commas use "$s" instead

man@earth> ./BASHscript
earth, moon, mars, venus, saturn,

SED Script

cat list.txt |  sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/, /g'

As you can see the SED statement is much shorter.

man@earth> ./SEDscript
earth, moon, mars, venus, saturn,

I hope someone out there finds this useful. If you have any questions or comments please post them below.

Turn off BEEP in BASH

Sometimes your on a computer that has speakers and if your on the termial it keeps beeping. This can be annoying if all your doing is using the tab key to use auto complete. Who ever thought that making the terminal beep was a good idea? Anyway below are some ways to get ride of the beeps.


In /etc/inputrc file add the line below.

set bell-style none

Put the line below in a profile. If you want to set it globally but in /etc/profile, otherwise set it in bash_profile, .bashrc, and/or .profile.

setterm -blength 0

This will make the beeping sound go away for good. If you have any questions or comments please post them below.

Rename & Combine Audio Book files into one audio book.

I like to listen to audio books and I get them them from places such as Audible, books on CD, the library or LibriVox. The issue is that all these places present the files to you in different ways. You can get one big file or a lot of small files. They all use different naming conventions which can make organizing your books difficult. To play my audio books I use the iBooks app from Apple and the Audible app form Audible, on my iPod Touch. Apples iBooks app works well but is missing some features that the Audible app has such as the bookmarking feature. The Audible app is really bad at playing books that are broken up into several files. The app will play the files out of order or show each file as a separate book.

So to fix the issues described above I recommend that you rename and/or combine all the files from one book into one file. Below I show the BASH script I wrote to fix this issue. I wrote and tested this script on a Mac. This script will also work on Linux and UNIX operating systems. After the files are combined the finder didn't show the right length for the audio book but when I imported the file into iTunes everything displayed right and the file worked fine.

The script below shows how to combine several MP3 files into one file. I put a comment after each command explaining what it is doing. If you have any questions about the script below ask it in the the comment section below.

script-book

Put contents of files here

#!/bin/bash
# This script was created on 20170216
# This script was created to combine MP3 files form audio books into one file.
# usage ./script-book bookname
#
if [ -z "$1" ]
  then
    echo -e "Please rerun the script with desired file name at the end \n 
              Example: ./script-book bookname"
    exit 1
fi

# The if statement checks for $1 variable. 

# If no variable is present then the gives error message and exits 

for s in $(ls |grep .mp3|egrep -v '(png|jpg)'|awk '{print $NF}')
# egrep removes pictures
# $NF gives the last column in the file name. This removes the spaces in the name.
do mv *$s $1$s
# This renames the files
cat *$s >> $1.mp3
# Cat combines the files
rm *$s
# Removes old files
done
ls -lh

In order to make the script work, copy it into the same directory the audio books files are located in. In the example below the script is called script-book and the ls command shows the script in the same directory as the audio book files.

man@earth> ls
The Hot Gate 001.mp3    The Hot Gate 021.mp3    The Hot Gate 041.mp3
The Hot Gate 002.mp3    The Hot Gate 022.mp3    The Hot Gate 042.mp3
The Hot Gate 003.mp3    The Hot Gate 023.mp3    The Hot Gate 043.mp3
The Hot Gate 004.mp3    The Hot Gate 024.mp3    The Hot Gate 044.mp3
The Hot Gate 005.mp3    The Hot Gate 025.mp3    The Hot Gate 045.mp3
The Hot Gate 006.mp3    The Hot Gate 026.mp3    The Hot Gate 046.mp3
The Hot Gate 007.mp3    The Hot Gate 027.mp3    The Hot Gate 047.mp3
The Hot Gate 008.mp3    The Hot Gate 028.mp3    The Hot Gate 048.mp3
The Hot Gate 009.mp3    The Hot Gate 029.mp3    The Hot Gate 049.mp3
The Hot Gate 010.mp3    The Hot Gate 030.mp3    The Hot Gate 050.mp3
The Hot Gate 011.mp3    The Hot Gate 031.mp3    The Hot Gate 051.mp3
The Hot Gate 012.mp3    The Hot Gate 032.mp3    The Hot Gate 052.mp3
The Hot Gate 013.mp3    The Hot Gate 033.mp3    The Hot Gate 053.mp3
The Hot Gate 014.mp3    The Hot Gate 034.mp3    The Hot Gate 054.mp3
The Hot Gate 015.mp3    The Hot Gate 035.mp3    The Hot Gate 055.mp3
The Hot Gate 016.mp3    The Hot Gate 036.mp3    The Hot Gate 056.mp3
The Hot Gate 017.mp3    The Hot Gate 037.mp3    The Hot Gate 057.mp3
The Hot Gate 018.mp3    The Hot Gate 038.mp3    The Hot Gate 058.mp3
The Hot Gate 019.mp3    The Hot Gate 039.mp3    The Hot Gate 059.mp3
The Hot Gate 020.mp3    The Hot Gate 040.mp3    script-book

Note- Make sure the script is executable before you run the command as shown below. Alternately you can also run the script by bash before the command if you don't know how to make the script executable. Example: bash ./script-book bookname

In the example below the I show how to execute the script and show example output. This shows that the script combined the files listed above and named the file TheHotGate and removed all the old unneeded files.

man@earth> ./script-book TheHotGate
total 447744
-rw-r--r--  1  arich   staff    219M  Feb 20 11:34    TheHotGate.mp3
-rw-r--r--  1  arich   staff    624B   Feb 20 11:33    script-book

I hope this helps anyone who is having a similar issue.


Links to places to get audio books.

LibriVox

             Audible

My BASH profile

These are notes on how I like to have my command prompt set up. I'm a BASH user so I will be updating the .profile and the .bashrc files. Both files are located in the users home directory.


This what my prompt looks like. It is a two line prompt, I find that it helps break up the commands from the output. The second line also gives more room for long commands and helps prevent the line from wrapping over top of the prompt.

earth:~

man@earth
< 

The basic bash prompt don't look all the great, as seen below. To get it look like the example above run the command below.

bash

bash$

export PS1="\[\e]2;\h:\w \a\[\e[0;31m\]\u\[\e[0m\]@\e[0;32m\h\e[0;34m\]\n<\[\e[0m\] "

Below I have posted my .profile file.

earth:~

man@earth
< more .profile

PATH=/usr/xpg4/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/openwin/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/ucb:/etc:/usr/X11/bin:/sbin:/usr/openv/netbackup:/usr/openv/netbackup/bin:/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd:/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/goodies:/usr/openv/volmgr/bin:/usr/sfw/bin/:$HOME

MANPATH=/usr/share/man:/usr/dt/man:/usr/openwin/share/man:/usr/X11/man:/usr/man:/usr/sfw/man:/usr/local/man:

EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi
TMOUT=0
TIMEOUT=0

#alias xterm="xterm -sl 1000 &"
#export PS1="\[\e]2;\h:\w \a\[\e[0;31m\]\u@\e[0;32m\h\e[0;34m\]>\[\e[0m\] "
export PS1="\[\e]2;\h:\w \a\[\e[0;31m\]\u\[\e[0m\]@\e[0;32m\h\e[0;34m\]\n<\[\e[0m\] "

The PATH statement is used to store the paths of the commands you want to use. This way you don't need to provide the full path for each command you want to run. The MANPATH statement is basically the same thing, but used to help you access the man pages.

My BASH Promt

Below are my notes on how I like my BASH prompt setup. This prompt has two lines which I find helps to break up the commands from the output. The second line also gives more room for long commands and helps prevent the line from wrapping over top of the prompt. I also update the title bar on the terminal or xterm with the hostname and current working directory. I find this helpful because this way I will always know who I am on the system, what server I'm logged into and what directory I'm in without typing any commands.

earth:~

man@earth
< 

Cut and paste the line below into your terminal or add in to your .profile file. If you like my prompt.
export PS1="\[\e]2;\h:\w \a\[\e[0;31m\]\u\[\e[0m\]@\e[0;32m\h\e[0;34m\]\n<\[\e[0m\] "

If you have any suggestions or questions post them below.

Bash Shortcut keys

I found this little reference chart on the short cut keys in BASH. These short cut keys allow for command line editing. I for example use Ctrl + A all the time to edit the line.

Ctrl + A	Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + E	Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + L	Clears the Screen, similar to the clear command
Ctrl + U	Clears the line before the cursor position. If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line.
Ctrl + H	Same as backspace
Ctrl + R	Let’s you search through previously used commands
Ctrl + C	Kill whatever you are running
Ctrl + D	Exit the current shell
Ctrl + Z	Puts whatever you are running into a suspended background process. fg restores it.
Ctrl + W	Delete the word before the cursor
Ctrl + K	Clear the line after the cursor
Ctrl + X	Then Backspace clear the line before the cursor
Ctrl + T	Swap the last two characters before the cursor
Esc + L	Changes to upper case
Esc + U	Changes to lower case
Esc + T	Swap the last two words before the cursor
Alt + F	Move cursor forward one word on the current line
Alt + B	Move cursor backward one word on the current line
Tab	Auto-complete files and folder names

Referance:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/keyboard-shortcuts-for-bash-command-shell-for-ubuntu-debian-suse-redhat-linux-etc/
I found this chart at the link above.