I know of system() and qx(), but I need to execute ~15 bash commands. E.g.
mkdir, chown, edquota -p user1 -u user2, cp -r, su - username, git, rm, ln -s
Question
Is there an efficient way to execute many Bash commands in Perl?
I don't care in this case about the output.
First, I'd use the equivalent Perl function for as many of those bash command as I could, which is most of the ones you included in your post. Then, for the rest of them I'd either use system() or qx() or backticks or one of the IPC:: modules (such as IPC::Run or IPC::Open3).
Use bash syntax for many commands. Separate them with ; or && or whatever takes your fancy (man bash).
$ perl -E 'system qq{date; date}'
In Linux, I like POE framework's POE::Wheel::Run module for running system commands (and code blocks) asynchronously. You say you do not care about the output, but if you need it in the future POE::Wheel::Run has an elegant interface allowing us to interact with the process.
my $s = <<END;
echo "1"
echo "2"
echo "3"
END
system("$s");
Related
I have a script where I need to start a command, then pass some additional commands as commands to that command. I tried
su
echo I should be root now:
who am I
exit
echo done.
... but it doesn't work: The su succeeds, but then the command prompt is just staring at me. If I type exit at the prompt, the echo and who am i etc start executing! And the echo done. doesn't get executed at all.
Similarly, I need for this to work over ssh:
ssh remotehost
# this should run under my account on remotehost
su
## this should run as root on remotehost
whoami
exit
## back
exit
# back
How do I solve this?
I am looking for answers which solve this in a general fashion, and which are not specific to su or ssh in particular. The intent is for this question to become a canonical for this particular pattern.
Adding to tripleee's answer:
It is important to remember that the section of the script formatted as a here-document for another shell is executed in a different shell with its own environment (and maybe even on a different machine).
If that block of your script contains parameter expansion, command substitution, and/or arithmetic expansion, then you must use the here-document facility of the shell slightly differently, depending on where you want those expansions to be performed.
1. All expansions must be performed within the scope of the parent shell.
Then the delimiter of the here document must be unquoted.
command <<DELIMITER
...
DELIMITER
Example:
#!/bin/bash
a=0
mylogin=$(whoami)
sudo sh <<END
a=1
mylogin=$(whoami)
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
END
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
Output:
a=0
mylogin=leon
a=0
mylogin=leon
2. All expansions must be performed within the scope of the child shell.
Then the delimiter of the here document must be quoted.
command <<'DELIMITER'
...
DELIMITER
Example:
#!/bin/bash
a=0
mylogin=$(whoami)
sudo sh <<'END'
a=1
mylogin=$(whoami)
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
END
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
Output:
a=1
mylogin=root
a=0
mylogin=leon
3. Some expansions must be performed in the child shell, some - in the parent.
Then the delimiter of the here document must be unquoted and you must escape those expansion expressions that must be performed in the child shell.
Example:
#!/bin/bash
a=0
mylogin=$(whoami)
sudo sh <<END
a=1
mylogin=\$(whoami)
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=\$mylogin
END
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
Output:
a=0
mylogin=root
a=0
mylogin=leon
A shell script is a sequence of commands. The shell will read the script file, and execute those commands one after the other.
In the usual case, there are no surprises here; but a frequent beginner error is assuming that some commands will take over from the shell, and start executing the following commands in the script file instead of the shell which is currently running this script. But that's not how it works.
Basically, scripts work exactly like interactive commands, but how exactly they work needs to be properly understood. Interactively, the shell reads a command (from standard input), runs that command (with input from standard input), and when it's done, it reads another command (from standard input).
Now, when executing a script, standard input is still the terminal (unless you used a redirection) but the commands are read from the script file, not from standard input. (The opposite would be very cumbersome indeed - any read would consume the next line of the script, cat would slurp all the rest of the script, and there would be no way to interact with it!) The script file only contains commands for the shell instance which executes it (though you can of course still use a here document etc to embed inputs as command arguments).
In other words, these "misunderstood" commands (su, ssh, sh, sudo, bash etc) when run alone (without arguments) will start an interactive shell, and in an interactive session, that's obviously fine; but when run from a script, that's very often not what you want.
All of these commands have ways to accept commands by ways other than in an interactive terminal session. Typically, each command supports a way to pass it commands as options or arguments:
su root -c 'who am i'
ssh user#remote uname -a
sh -c 'who am i; echo success'
Many of these commands will also accept commands on standard input:
printf 'uname -a; who am i; uptime' | su
printf 'uname -a; who am i; uptime' | ssh user#remote
printf 'uname -a; who am i; uptime' | sh
which also conveniently allows you to use here documents:
ssh user#remote <<'____HERE'
uname -a
who am i
uptime
____HERE
sh <<'____HERE'
uname -a
who am i
uptime
____HERE
For commands which accept a single command argument, that command can be sh or bash with multiple commands:
sudo sh -c 'uname -a; who am i; uptime'
As an aside, you generally don't need an explicit exit because the command will terminate anyway when it has executed the script (sequence of commands) you passed in for execution.
If you want a generic solution which will work for any kind of program, you can use the expect command.
Extract from the manual page:
Expect is a program that "talks" to other interactive programs according to a script. Following the script, Expect knows what can be expected from a program and what the correct response should be. An interpreted language provides branching and high-level control structures to direct the dialogue. In addition, the user can take control and interact directly when desired, afterward returning control to the script.
Here is a working example using expect:
set timeout 60
spawn sudo su -
expect "*?assword" { send "*secretpassword*\r" }
send_user "I should be root now:"
expect "#" { send "whoami\r" }
expect "#" { send "exit\r" }
send_user "Done.\n"
exit
The script can then be launched with a simple command:
$ expect -f custom.script
You can view a full example in the following page: http://www.journaldev.com/1405/expect-script-example-for-ssh-and-su-login-and-running-commands
Note: The answer proposed by #tripleee would only work if standard input could be read once at the start of the command, or if a tty had been allocated, and won't work for any interactive program.
Example of errors if you use a pipe
echo "su whoami" |ssh remotehost
--> su: must be run from a terminal
echo "sudo whoami" |ssh remotehost
--> sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified
In SSH, you might force a TTY allocation with multiple -t parameters, but when sudo will ask for the password, it will fail.
Without the use of a program like expect any call to a function/program which might get information from stdin will make the next command fail:
ssh use#host <<'____HERE'
echo "Enter your name:"
read name
echo "ok."
____HERE
--> The `echo "ok."` string will be passed to the "read" command
I use torque to submit the test script shown blow
#!/bin/bash
#PBS -N test
#PBS -l nodes=1:ppn=1
#PBS -q ser
#PBS -V
#PBS -S /bin/bash
sed 's/a//' <<< aaabbbaaa
sed 's/\(a\)//' <<< aaabbbaaa
sed 's/a\+//' <<< aaabbbaaa
The expect output should be
aabbbaaa
aabbbaaa
bbbaaa
but actually when i use qsub to submit this file, the output becomes
aabbbaaa
aaabbbaaa
aaabbbaaa
The last two commands do not work. And it seems that the character '\' leads to the fault. But why does this happen.
The sed implementation on the server probably has a different syntax than what you have locally.
Without details about the remote system, this is mildly speculative; but look for the manual page and search for an option to enable Extended Regular Expression syntax (usually -E or -r; if available, probably lose the backslash before the regex specials then).
As a partial and obvious workaround, aa* is equivalent to a\+ but no similar workaround exists for grouping.
Maybe also read up on the differences between POSIX Basic Regular Expression syntax (BRE) and ERE; though chances are your PBS system is using something which even predates POSIX if it's legacy big iron.
If you want to write code which is portable between Linux, MacOS, and whatever behemoth dinosaur OS you have on the PBS system, maybe try Perl instead of sed. Even if you can only rely on Perl 4.x constructs, that's a platform which is a lot more uniform (and also a lot more versatile) than trying to figure out how to write portable sed scripts.
perl -pe 's/(a+)//'
This is a question derives from another post. Based upon the comments and answer from that post, I change the following shebang + eval into another one:
Old works version
#!/bin/perl
eval 'exec perl5 -S $0 ${1+"$#"}'
if 0;
New doesn't work version
#!/bin/sh
eval 'exec perl5 -S $0 ${1+"$#"}'
if 0;
Notice that I change #!/bin/perl to #!/bin/sh and based upon my understanding, the new version should also work because the script is treated like shell script and eval get executed and perl5 is invoked to use perl to execute the same script. However, when I actually run this, I got:
/bin/sh: -S: invalid option
Can anyone explain why this case the script is failed. Do I misunderstand something? I'm using ksh
Also this web page I found online seems suggest that my new version should work as well.
Thanks much!
From the Perl documentation:
If the #! line does not contain the word "perl" nor the word "indir", the program named after the #! is executed instead of the Perl interpreter. This is slightly bizarre, but it helps people on machines that don't do #!, because they can tell a program that their SHELL is /usr/bin/perl, and Perl will then dispatch the program to the correct interpreter for them.
So if you launch the modified version as ./script:
Your shell executes ./script
The kernel actually executes /bin/sh ./script
sh executes perl5 -S ./script
perl5 executes /bin/sh -S ./script because it sees a shebang that doesn't contain perl.
sh dies because it doesn't recognize the -S option.
And if you launch the modified version as perl5 script:
Your shell executes perl5 script
perl5 executes /bin/sh -S script because it sees a shebang that doesn't contain perl.
sh dies because it doesn't recognize the -S option.
Also this web page I found online seems suggest that my new version should work as well.
The code on that page is significantly different than the code you used. In that code, there's an explicit instruction (-x) to ignore the actual shebang line, and to look for one that contains perl later in the file (which is also missing from your code).
I want to call from perl the command "touch" on a large list of files.
The command I am using fails:
$cmd = "touch $list_of_files";
$ret=system("sudo -u user bash -c \"$cmd\"");
print $ret;
Is there a limitation of command length in bash or is it because I am using 'system'?
Beside splitting the list of files in smaller lists is there a solution to my problem?
Thanks
Is there a limitation of command length in bash
I believe so. But why are you suing bash at all?
system("sudo", "-u", "user", "touch", #list_of_files);
Can sh itself check if a program exists or is in path?
I.e., not with the help of the "which" program.
I don't believe sh can directly. But perhaps something like:
which() {
save_IFS=$IFS
IFS=:
for d in $PATH; do
test -x $d/$1 && echo $d/$1
done
IFS=$save_IFS
}
and here's a nice variation that uses a subshell so that restoring IFS is not necessary:
which() (
IFS=:
for d in $PATH; do
test -x $d/$1 && echo $d/$1
done
)
Also, (in bash) if the command has been executed in the past and bash has already done the PATH search, you can see what it found with hash -t.
bash-3.2$ hash -t which
bash: hash: which: not found
bash-3.2$ which foo
bash-3.2$ hash -t which
/usr/bin/which
The utility command -v $CMD is apparently a portable option (in the sense of being part of POSIX); see also the very similar (though bash-specific) question, in particular this answer.