Archiv der Kategorie: Shell

my package of the day: weather-util (weather report and forecast for the console)

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Let me introduce you today into a tool that a lot of people might evaluate as useless: Jeremy Stanley’s weather-util. Whith this tiny python script, which finally found its way into Debian Etch and Ubuntu repositories, you can retrieve weather information from weather stations worldwide directly from the command line.

After installing it by running „aptitude install weather-util“ or synaptec, call „weather“:

$ weather
Current conditions at Raleigh-Durham International Airport (KRDU)
Last updated Jun 04, 2008 - 01:51 AM EDT / 2008.06.04 0551 UTC
   Wind: from the S (180 degrees) at 10 MPH (9 KT)
   Sky conditions: mostly cloudy
   Temperature: 72.0 F (22.2 C)
   Relative Humidity: 73%

Pretty impressive, isn’t it? Weather just makes an http call to a weather server for a preset station (where the heck is Raleigh-Durham International Airport?) and returns the current weather information. Of course you can also retrieve the forecast for the next days by running „weather -f“:

$ weather -f
Current conditions at Raleigh-Durham International Airport (KRDU)
Last updated Jun 04, 2008 - 01:51 AM EDT / 2008.06.04 0551 UTC
   Wind: from the S (180 degrees) at 10 MPH (9 KT)
   Sky conditions: mostly cloudy
   Temperature: 72.0 F (22.2 C)
   Relative Humidity: 73%
City Forecast for Raleigh Durham, NC
Issued Wednesday morning - Jun 4, 2008
   Wednesday... Partly cloudy, high 67, 20% chance of precipitation.
   Wednesday night... Low 96, 20% chance of precipitation.
   Thursday... Partly cloudy, high 71, 10% chance of precipitation.
   Thursday night... Low 97.
   Friday... High 72.

Sadfully the forecast only displays Fahrenheit, but that way we have enough space for patching the package :)

Retrieving local weather information

Now we are, of course, we are interested in the weather in our area. The easiest way is getting the ID for a weather station. Just go to http://weather.noaa.gov/ and choose your country/city/station by using the drop down menus for US and international stations. When you found a station close to your point of interest you can see a four letter id in round brackets. See the example above – the airport has KRDU. I am using EDDI most of the times which is Berlin Tempelhof – an airport in the city center of Berlin.

So you are ready to ask politely for weather again by giving the id with „weather –id=ID“, in my case „–id=EDDI“. (note: you can also make it short with „-iEDDI“:

$ weather --id=EDDI
Current conditions at Germany (EDDI) 52-28N 013-24E 49M (EDDI)
Last updated Jun 04, 2008 - 01:50 AM EDT / 2008.06.04 0550 UTC
   Wind: from the E (080 degrees) at 13 MPH (11 KT)
   Temperature: 62 F (17 C)
   Relative Humidity: 59%

Please note: Not all weather stations support forecasts (-f) and drop a 404 http error. You just have to try this. You can also switch on „verbose“ mode (-v) which gives you even more details.

Weather on the command line without weather-util?

Works like a charm, doesn’t it? For the curious people around who want to understand where weather-util pulls the information from: See

http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/

for reference. Just text files on a web server regularly updated. Click around and go to there parent dir – you’ll find even more interesting information. So using weather-util without weather-util should be not a big deal.

Screen integration

Now for the console lovers: You are using screen with a pimped status bar, don’t you? And in your wildest dreams you imagined the status bar showing the weather report, so you even don’t have to look outside the window because as a console guy you don’t even like your real „window“? No problem anymore by using screens backticks and weather-util.

As I noticed that weather-util runs into trouble from time to time when not being able to send it’s http request, I decided for a indirect weather pull by writing the information I need to a flat file by a cronjob. We just call weather-util and use awk to grab the snippet we need. I am interested in the temperature in Celsius. weather-util shows this line:

Temperature: 62 F (17 C)

So I use the following very quick and very dirty awk to get the „17“ out:

$ weather -iEDDI | awk '/Temperature/ {print $4}' | \
awk -F "(" '{print $2}'

Feel free to brush this up and report back. I am sure you can improve to use only one awk call instead of two.

You save this line to a shell script that is scheduled to run every five minutes and direct it via „>“ to write it’s output to a flat txt file. Within you .screenrc you read this file and display the contents in you status bar.
~/.screenrc:

startup_message off
defscrollback 1024
hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
backtick 1 0 300 cat /path/to/weather-text-file.txt

# remove line breaks made with "\"on the following lines
caption always "%{+b rk}$USER@%{wk}%H | %{yk}(Last: %l) %{gk} \
Weather: %1`C  %-21=%{wk}%D %d.%m.%Y %0c"
hardstatus alwayslastline "%?%-Lw%?%{wb}%n*%f %t%?(%u)\
%?%{kw}%?%+Lw%? %{wk}"

Make sure that have the file /path/to/weather-text-file.txt with the temperature in it. Now run screen and enjoy you shiny new status bar. See the green area in the screenshot below:
screen-weather.png

So that’s all for now. You should be able to play around with weather-util and screen to get the information you need (or let’s say „want“ :).

[update]

The incredible mnemonikk updated my awk | awk to a onetime sed within seconds:

$ weather -iEDDI | sed -n 's/.*Temperature:.*(\(.*\))/\1/p'

Thank you!

my package of the day: less (yes, less)

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5

Let me tell you something about „less“: You are probably underrating it for no reason. Of course you know „less“ is always there and it does it’s job – showing files while being able to scroll backward – and some even use it instead of „tail“. But, hey, let’s examine some of the command line options to get more out of less:

-M: this option extends the prompt on the bottom. By default less in most cases just shows the name of the file it is showing, with „-M“ turned on, it also shows how many lines the files has, which lines it is currently showing and how far (in percent) you have gone. No killer feature, but nice to have.

-i: this option causes searches to ignore cases. A search for „pattern“ therefore also finds „PaTTerN“. You like this, don’t you? You like this even more, as this search still enables you to switch case sensitive search on by searching for a pattern containing at least one uppercase letter. A search for „Pattern“ for instance would still be case sensitive. If you even want to prevent this, you could use „-I“ which totally ignores cases.

-r: Sometimes getting warnings about binary characters? With „-r“ you tell less to display raw characters. This can help you when displaying files containing color codes. It is said that log files from Rails contain these types of code.

-c: Just a gimmick to redraw the screen more clearly by beginning from the top line instead of scrolling. This might result in a slightly increased data transfer rate when using ssh but can improve usability.

-a: This causes less to skip found search patterns when pressing „n“ not from item to item but from page to page. You might know the pain when searching for a pattern that comes up more than once on a page and you start hammering „n“ getting confused on what you have already seen and what not. This options just skips at least the current page before displaying the next found pattern while still marking all patterns of course.

-f: This can help you in conjunction with „-r“ to force the display of raw characters without being questioned again.

Confused about the sequence of the options? Don’t be:

$ less -Mircaf

is something you just learn or create an alias for.

This one, to sum up the options, will display an extended prompt, ignores cases in searches, while being able to switch them on, skip found search patterns at least per page, display raw characters like color codes without asking and redraws the screen as good as possible.

Another feature that should be mentioned is the „follow file“ mode that some of you might know. It is similar to tail as it shows you the content of a file that gets appended while viewing. You turn this mode on by pressing „F“ (uppercase F). The advantage over tail is that you can interrupt the mode by pressing ctrl-c and scroll back though still being able to return to follow by pressing „F“.

Not so familiar is the fact that you also can jump into the follow mode from the command line:

$ less +F

starts the follow mode immediatly. Of course typing „+F“ on the command line is not sophisticated as typing „tail“ but you can create an alias for it like „ltail“ or whatever you like.

As a summary:

$ alias eless="less -Mircaf"
$ alias ltail="less +F"

gives you two new commands. „eless“ as an extended less provides you with the described features. „ltail“ simulates „tail“ but enables you to jump back to the normal less by pressing ctrl-c.

Instead of creating an alias for „less -Mircaf“ you could also use the environment variable „LESS“:

$ export LESS="-Mircaf"

A credit goes to mnemonikk, who was just too lazy to blog this.

Please note: As less is still being developped, command line options might slightly change. For instance in newer version „-R“ instead of „-rf“ might lead to the same result. Just try it or check the version of less you are running („less –version“) against the official less changelog.

removing outdated ssh fingerprints from known_hosts with sed or … ssh-keygen

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17

At least from the last issue in Debian-based systems including Ubuntu you might know the pain of getting the message from you ssh client that the server host key has changed as ssh stores the fingerprint of ssh daemons it connects to. Actually this is a neat feature because it helps you detecting man in the middle attacks, dns issues and other things you probably should notice.

Until recently I opened the file .ssh/known_hosts in vim, deleted the entry, saved the file and started over again. I randomly checked „man ssh“ which gives you a lot of hints about the usage of known_hosts but I just did not find information about how to delete an old fingerprint or even overwrite it. I imagined something like „ssh –update-fingerpring hostname“ with an interactive yes/no question you cannot skip. There is the setting „StrictHostKeyChecking“ that might get you out of the fingerprint-has-changed-trouble but it does not solve the real problem as you want those checks.

So after hanging around with Mnemonikk discussing this he pointed out a very simple method with „sed“ that is really handy and helps you understanding sed more deeply. You can advise „sed“ to run a command on a specific line. So have a look at this session:

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$ ssh secrethost
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
[...]
Offending key in /home/ccm/.ssh/known_hosts:46
[...]
Host key verification failed.
$ sed -i "46 d" .ssh/known_hosts
$ ssh secrethost
The authenticity of host 'secrethost (1.2.3.4)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is ab:cd:ef:ab:cd:ef:ab:cd:ef:ab:cd:ef:ab:cd:ef:ab.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

We just took the line number 46 which ssh complains about and run in in-place-editing mode (-i) with the command run on line 46 the command delete (d). That was easy, wasn’t it? Small lesson learned about sed. Thank you Mnemonikk (he is currently working on a screencast about screen if you let me leak some information here :).

But to be honest I’s still looking for the „official“ method the delete a key from known_hosts. Therefore I browsed through the man pages and finally found what I was looking for in „man ssh-keygen“. Yes, definitely zero points for usability as deleting with a tool named „generator“ is confusing but it works, however. You can advice ssh-keygen to delete (-R) fingerprints for a hostname which helps you when you turned hashed hostnames on in you known_hosts:

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$ ssh secrethost
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
[...]
Offending key in /home/ccm/.ssh/known_hosts:63
[...]
Host key verification failed.
[ccm@hasung:255:/etc/ssh]$ ssh-keygen -R secrethost
/home/ccm/.ssh/known_hosts updated.
Original contents retained as /home/ccm/.ssh/known_hosts.old
[ccm@hasung:0:/etc/ssh]$ ssh secrethost
The authenticity of host 'secrethost (1.2.3.4)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is ab:cd:ef:ab:cd:ef:ab:cd:ef:ab:cd:ef:ab:cd:ef:ab.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

So „ssh-keygen -R hostname“ is a nice syntax as you even do not have to provide the file name and path for known_hosts and it works with hashed names. Nevertheless I’ll also use the sed syntax – keep it trained it’ll help you in other cases also.

new kernel release detection snippet

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4

Just a small and old snippet that might be helpful or an example: Some years ago I’s in need of getting to know early about new released Linux kernel versions. Therefore I wrote a (not sophisticated but working) crontabbed script checking the kernel page for a new stable Linux kernel and alerting me via mail if a new version is found with link to the changelog:

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#!/bin/bash
CURRENTVERSION=`w3m -dump \
 http://www.kernel.org/kdist/finger_banner \
 | head -n 1 | awk '{print $10}'`
SAVEDVERSION=`cat ~/bin/kernelversion.log \
 | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $2}'`
SAVEDDATE=`cat ~/bin/kernelversion.log \
 | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $1}'`
MAILADDRESS=mail@address.tld
 
if [[ "$CURRENTVERSION" != "$SAVEDVERSION" ]]
  then
  CURRENTDATE=`date +'%Y-%m-%d'`
  echo "$CURRENTDATE $CURRENTVERSION" \
  >> ~/bin/kernelversion.log
  echo -e "Detected new kernel version \
   ${CURRENTVERSION} on ${CURRENTDATE} \
   (replacing version ${SAVEDVERSION} from\
   ${SAVEDDATE}). Please check \
   http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-\
   ${CURRENTVERSION} forr details." \
 | mail -s "new kernel ${CURRENTVERSION}" \
 ${MAILADDRESS}
fi

The only real bug in this script is that it does not detect network issues and therefore alerts you when it is not able to get a http response. But this could be fixed with one or two lines of code. And yes most lines could be more elegant :) Probably today there are better channels like rss or even an old mailing list with announcements that I never looked for, but this snippet does it’s job very well.

update:

Fixed the broken wrapping of the script. Sorry about this. (Thank you Jeremy.)

Jonne stated that of course using a feed like http://kernel.org/kdist/rss.xml is the better choice today. He is surely right about this  though sometimes receiving a mail is a need.