Can kdb read from a named pipe? - solaris

I hope I'm doing something wrong, but it seems like kdb can't read data from named pipes (at least on Solaris). It blocks until they're written to but then returns none of the data that was written.
I can create a text file:
$ echo Mary had a little lamb > lamb.txt
and kdb will happily read it:
q) read0 `:/tmp/lamb.txt
enlist "Mary had a little lamb"
I can create a named pipe:
$ mkfifo lamb.pipe
and trying to read from it:
q) read0 `:/tmp/lamb.pipe
will cause kdb to block. Writing to the pipe:
$ cat lamb.txt > lamb.pipe
will cause kdb to return the empty list:
()
Can kdb read from named pipes? Should I just give up? I don't think it's a permissions thing (I tried setting -m 777 on my mkfifo command but that made no difference).

With release kdb+ v3.4 Q has support for named pipes: Depending on whether you want to implement a streaming algorithm or just read from the pipe use either .Q.fps or read1 on a fifo pipe:
To implement streaming you can do something like:
q).Q.fps[0N!]`:lamb.pipe
Then $ cat lamb.txt > lamb.pipe
will print
,"Mary had a little lamb"
in your q session. More meaningful algorithms can be implemented by replacing 0N! with an appropriate function.
To read the context of your file into a variable do:
q)h:hopen`:fifo://lamb.pipe
q)myText: `char$read1(h)
q)myText
"Mary had a little lamb\n"
See more about named pipes here.

when read0 fails, you can frequently fake it with system"cat ...". (i found this originally when trying to read stuff from /proc that also doesn't cooperate with read0.)
q)system"cat /tmp/lamb.pipe"
<blocks until you cat into the pipe in the other window>
"Mary had a little lamb"
q)
just be aware there's a reasonably high overhead (as such things go in q) for invoking system—it spawns a whole shell process just to run whatever your command is
you might also be able to do it directly with a custom C extension, probably calling read(2) directly…

The algorithm for read0 is not available to see what it is doing under the hood but, as far as I can tell, it expects a finite stream and not a continuous one; so it will will block until it receives an EOF signal.

Streaming from pipe is supported from v3.4
Details steps:
Check duplicated pipe file
rm -f /path/dataPipeFileName
Create named pipe
mkfifo /path/dataPipeFileName
Feed data
q).util.system[$1]; $1=command to fetch data > /path/dataPipeFileName &
Connect pipe using kdb .Q.fps
q).Q.fps[0N!]`$":/path/",dataPipeFileName;
Reference:
.Q.fps (streaming algorithm)
Syntax: .Q.fps[x;y] Where x is a unary function and y is a filepath
.Q.fs for pipes. (Since V3.4) Reads conveniently sized lumps of complete "\n" delimited records from a pipe and applies a function to each record. This enables you to implement a streaming algorithm to convert a large CSV file into an on-disk kdb+ database without holding the data in memory all at once.

Related

Perl interface with Aspell

I am trying to identify misspelled words with Aspell via Perl. I am working on a Linux server without administrator privileges which means I have access to Perl and Aspell but not, for example, Text::Aspell which is a Perl interface for Aspell.
I want to do the very simple task of passing a list of words to Aspell and having it return the words that are misspelled. If the words I want to check are "dad word lkjlkjlkj" I can do this through the command line with the following commands:
aspell list
dad word lkjlkjlkj
Aspell requires CTRL + D at the end to submit the word list. It would then return "lkjlkjlkj", as this isn't in the dictionary.
In order to do the exact same thing, but submitted via Perl (because I need to do this for thousands of documents) I have tried:
my $list = q(dad word lkjlkjlkj):
my #arguments = ("aspell list", $list, "^D");
my $aspell_out=`#arguments`;
print "Aspell output = $aspell_out\n";
The expected output is "Aspell output = lkjlkjlkj" because this is the output that Aspell gives when you submit these commands via the command line. However, the actual output is just "Aspell output = ". That is, Perl does not capture any output from Aspell. No errors are thrown.
I am not an expert programmer, but I thought this would be a fairly simple task. I've tried various iterations of this code and nothing works. I did some digging and I'm concerned that perhaps because Aspell is interactive, I need to use something like Expect, but I cannot figure out how to use it. Nor am I sure that it is actually the solution to my problem. I also think ^D should be an appropriate replacement for CTRL+D at the end of the commands, but all I know is it doesn't throw an error. I also tried \cd instead. Whatever it is, there is obviously an issue in either submitting the command or capturing the output.
The complication with using aspell out of a program is that it is an interactive and command-line driver tool, as you suspect. However, there is a simple way to do what you need.
In order to use aspell's command list one needs to pass it words via STDIN, as its man page says. While I find the GNU Aspell manual a little difficult to get going with, passing input to a program via its STDIN is easy enough and we can rewrite the invocation as
echo dad word lkj | aspell list
We get lkj printed back, as due. Now this can run out of a program just as it stands
my $word_list = q(word lkj good asdf);
my $cmd = qq(echo $word_list | aspell list);
my #aspell_out = qx($cmd);
print for #aspell_out;
This prints lines lkj and asdf.
I assemble the command in a string (as opposed to an array) for specific reasons, explained below. The qx is the operator form of backticks, which I prefer for its far superior readability.
Note that qx can return all output in a string, if in scalar context (assigned to a scalar for example), or in a list when in list context. Here I assign to an array so you get each word as an element (alas, each also comes with a newline, so may want to do chomp #aspell_out;).
Comment on a list vs string form of a command
I think that it's safe to recommend to use a list-form for a command, in general. So we'd say
my #cmd = ('ls', '-l', $dir); # to be run as an external command
instead of
my $cmd = "ls -l $dir"; # to be run as an external command
The list form generally makes it easier to manage the command, and it avoids the shell altogether.
However, this case is a little different
The qx operator doesn't really behave differently -- the array gets concatenated into a string, and that runs. The very fact that we can pass it an array is incidental, and not even documented
We need to pipe input to aspell's STDIN, and shell does that for us simply. We can use a shell with command's LIST form as well, but then we'd need to invoke it explicitly. We can also go for aspell's STDIN by means other than the shell but that's more complex
With a command in a list the command name must be the first word, so that "aspell list" from the question is wrong and it should fail (there is no command named that) ... except that in this case it wouldn't (if the rest were correct), since for qx the array gets collapsed into a string
Finally, apsell nicely exposes its API in a C library and that's been utilized for the module you mention. I'd suggest to install it as a user (no privileges needed) and use that.
You should take a step back and investigate if you can install Text::Aspell without administrator privilige. In most cases that's perfectly possible.
You can install modules into your home directory. If there is no C-compiler available on the server you can install the module on a compatible machine, compile and copy the files.

Variable not being recognized after "read"

-- Edit : Resolved. See answer.
Background:
I'm writing a shell that will perform some extra actions required on our system when someone resizes a database.
The shell is written in ksh (requirement), the OS is Solaris 5.10 .
The problem is with one of the checks, which verifies there's enough free space on the underlying OS.
Problem:
The check reads the df -k line for root, which is what I check in this step, and prints it to a file. I then "read" the contents into variables which I use in calculations.
Unfortunately, when I try to run an arithmetic operation on one of the variables, I get an error indicating it is null. And a debug output line I've placed after that line verifies that it is null... It lost it's value...
I've tried every method of doing this I could find online, they work when I run it manually, but not inside the shell file.
(* The file does have #!/usr/bin/ksh)
Code:
df -k | grep "rpool/ROOT" > dftest.out
RPOOL_NAME=""; declare -i TOTAL_SIZE=0; USED_SPACE=0; AVAILABLE_SPACE=0; AVAILABLE_PERCENT=0; RSIGN=""
read RPOOL_NAME TOTAL_SIZE USED_SPACE AVAILABLE_SPACE AVAILABLE_PERCENT RSIGN < dftest.out
\rm dftest.out
echo $RPOOL_NAME $TOTAL_SIZE $USED_SPACE $AVAILABLE_SPACE $AVAILABLE_PERCENT $RSIGN
((TOTAL_SIZE=$TOTAL_SIZE/1024))
This is the result:
DBResize.sh[11]: TOTAL_SIZE=/1024: syntax error
I'm pulling hairs at this point, any help would be appreciated.
The code you posted cannot produce the output you posted. Most obviously, the error is signalled at line 11 but you posted fewer than 11 lines of code. The previous lines may matter. Always post complete code when you ask for help.
More concretely, the declare command doesn't exist in ksh, it's a bash thing. You can achieve the same result with typeset (declare is a bash equivalent to typeset, but not all options are the same). Either you're executing this script with bash, or there's another error message about declare, or you've defined some additional commands including declare which may change the behavior of this code.
None of this should have an impact on the particular problem that you're posting about, however. The variables created by read remain assigned until the end of the subshell, i.e. until the code hits a ), the end of a pipe (left-hand side of the pipe only in ksh), etc.
About the use of declare or typeset, note that you're only declaring TOTAL_SIZE as an integer. For the other variables, you're just assigning a value which happens to consist exclusively of digits. It doesn't matter for the code you posted, but it's probably not what you meant.
One thing that may be happening is that grep matches nothing, and therefore read reads an empty line. You should check for errors. Use set -e in scripts to exit at the first error. (There are cases where set -e doesn't catch errors, but it's a good start.)
Another thing that may be happening is that df is splitting its output onto multiple lines because the first column containing the filesystem name is too large. To prevent this splitting, pass the option -P.
Using a temporary file is fragile: the code may be executed in a read-only directory, another process may want to access the same file at the same time... Here a temporary file is useless. Just pipe directly into read. In ksh (unlike most other sh variants including bash), the right-hand side of a pipe runs in the main shell, so assignments to variables in the right-hand side of a pipe remain available in the following commands.
It doesn't matter in this particular script, but you can use a variable without $ in an arithmetic expression. Using $ substitutes a string which can have confusing results, e.g. a='1+2'; $((a*3)) expands to 7. Not using $ uses the numerical value (in ksh, a='1+2'; $((a*3)) expands to 9; in some sh implementations you get an error because a's value is not numeric).
#!/usr/bin/ksh
set -e
typeset -i TOTAL_SIZE=0 USED_SPACE=0 AVAILABLE_SPACE=0 AVAILABLE_PERCENT=0
df -Pk | grep "rpool/ROOT" | read RPOOL_NAME TOTAL_SIZE USED_SPACE AVAILABLE_SPACE AVAILABLE_PERCENT RSIGN
echo $RPOOL_NAME $TOTAL_SIZE $USED_SPACE $AVAILABLE_SPACE $AVAILABLE_PERCENT $RSIGN
((TOTAL_SIZE=TOTAL_SIZE/1024))
Strange...when I get rid of your "declare" line, your original code seems to work perfectly well (at least with ksh on Linux)
The code :
#!/bin/ksh
df -k | grep "/home" > dftest.out
read RPOOL_NAME TOTAL_SIZE USED_SPACE AVAILABLE_SPACE AVAILABLE_PERCENT RSIGN < dftest.out
\rm dftest.out
echo $RPOOL_NAME $TOTAL_SIZE $USED_SPACE $AVAILABLE_SPACE $AVAILABLE_PERCENT $RSIGN
((TOTAL_SIZE=$TOTAL_SIZE/1024))
print $TOTAL_SIZE
The result :
32962416 5732492 25552588 19% /home
5598
Which are the value a simple df -k is returning. The variables seem to last.
For those interested, I have figured out that it is not possible to use "read" the way I was using it.
The variable values assigned by "read" simply "do not last".
To remedy this, I have applied the less than ideal solution of using the standard "while read" format, and inside the loop, echo selected variables into a variable file.
Once said file was created, I just "loaded" it.
(pseudo code:)
LOOP START
echo "VAR_A="$VAR_A"; VAR_B="$VAR_B";" > somefile.out
LOOP END
. somefile.out

perl memory usage when processing a file inline

I have a CGI script that's used by our employees to fetch logs from servers that they don't have direct access to. For reasons I won't go into, after a recent update to our app some of these logs now have characters like linefeeds, tabs, backslashes, etc. translated into their text equivalents. As such, I've modified the CGI script to invoke the following to convert these back to their original values:
perl -i -pe 's/\\r/\r/g && s/\\n/\n/g && s/\\t/\t/g && s/\\\//\//g' $filename
I was just informed that some people are now getting out of memory errors when they try to fetch logs that are fairly large (a few hundred MB).
My question: How does perl manage memory when an inline command like this is invoked? Is it reading the whole file in, processing it, then writing it out, or is it creating a temporary file, processing the lines from the input file one at a time then replacing the file once complete?
This is using perl 5.10.1 on a 64-bit Amazon linux instance.
The -p switch creates a while(<>){...; print} loop to iterate on each “line” in your input file.
If all of your newlines have been converted into "\\n", then your file would just be a single very long line. Therefore, your command would be loading the entire file into memory to perform your fix.
To avoid that, you'll have to intentionally buffer the file using either sysread or $/.
It would probably be easiest to create an actual script instead of a one-liner to do the work. However, if you know that all of your newlines are converted, then one simple fix would be to use $/ = "\\n"
As a secondary note, your regex is flawed. You're currently listing out your translations s/// using a shortcut operator. If any one of the earlier regexes doesn't match for a particular line, then no other translations would be attempted. You should instead use simple semicolons to separate your regexes:
's/\\r/\r/g; s/\\n/\n/g; s/\\t/\t/g; s|\\/|/|g'

updating table rows based on txt file

I have been searching but so far I only found how to insert date into tables based on a csv files.
I have the following scenario:
Directory name = ticketID
Inside this directory I have a couple of files, like:
Description.txt
Summary.txt - Contains ticket header and has been imported succefully.
Progress_#.txt - this is everytime a ticket gets udpdated. I get a new file.
Solution.txt
Importing the Issue.txt was easy since this was actually a CSV.
Now my problem is with Description and Progress files.
I need to update the existing rows with the data from this files. Something on the line of
update table_ticket set table_ticket.description = Description.txt where ticket_number = directoryname
I'm using PostgreSQL and the COPY command is valid for new data and it would still fail due to the ',;/ special chars.
I wanted to do this using bash script, but it seem that it is it won't be possible:
for i in `find . -type d`
do
update table_ticket
set table_ticket.description = $i/Description.txt
where ticket_number = $i
done
Of course the above code would take into consideration connection to the database.
Anyone has a idea on how I could achieve this using shell script. Or would it be better to just make something in Java and read and update the record, although I would like to avoid this approach.
Thanks
Alex
Thanks for the answer, but I came across this:
psql -U dbuser -h dbhost db
\set content = `cat PATH/Description.txt`
update table_ticket set description = :'content' where ticketnr = TICKETNR;
Putting this into a simple script I created the following:
#!/bin/bash
for i in `find . -type d|grep ^./CS`
do
p=`echo $i|cut -b3-12 -`
echo $p
sed s/PATH/${p}/g cmd.sql > cmd.tmp.sql
ticketnr=`echo $p|cut -b5-10 -`
sed -i s/TICKETNR/${ticketnr}/g cmd.tmp.sql
cat cmd.tmp.sql
psql -U supportAdmin -h localhost supportdb -f cmd.tmp.sql
done
The downside is that it will create always a new connection, later I'll change to create a single file
But it does exactly what I was looking for, putting the contents inside a single column.
psql can't read the file in for you directly unless you intend to store it as a large object in which case you can use lo_import. See the psql command \lo_import.
Update: #AlexandreAlves points out that you can actually slurp file content in using
\set myvar = `cat somefile`
then reference it as a psql variable with :'myvar'. Handy.
While it's possible to read the file in using the shell and feed it to psql it's going to be awkward at best as the shell offers neither a native PostgreSQL database driver with parameterised query support nor any text escaping functions. You'd have to roll your own string escaping.
Even then, you need to know that the text encoding of the input file is valid for your client_encoding otherwise you'll insert garbage and/or get errors. It quickly lands up being easier to do it in a langage with proper integration with PostgreSQL like Python, Perl, Ruby or Java.
There is a way to do what you want in bash if you really must, though: use Pg's delimited dollar quoting with a randomized delimiter to help prevent SQL injection attacks. It's not perfect but it's pretty darn close. I'm writing an example now.
Given problematic file:
$ cat > difficult.txt <__END__
Shell metacharacters like: $!(){}*?"'
SQL-significant characters like "'()
__END__
and sample table:
psql -c 'CREATE TABLE testfile(filecontent text not null);'
You can:
#!/bin/bash
filetoread=$1
sep=$(printf '%04x%04x\n' $RANDOM $RANDOM)
psql <<__END__
INSERT INTO testfile(filecontent) VALUES (
\$x${sep}\$$(cat ${filetoread})\$x${sep}\$
);
__END__
This could be a little hard to read and the random string generation is bash specific, though I'm sure there are probably portable approaches.
A random tag string consisting of alphanumeric characters (I used hex for convenience) is generated and stored in seq.
psql is then invoked with a here-document tag that isn't quoted. The lack of quoting is important, as <<'__END__' would tell bash not to interpret shell metacharacters within the string, wheras plain <<__END__ allows the shell to interpret them. We need the shell to interpret metacharacters as we need to substitute sep into the here document and also need to use $(...) (equivalent to backticks) to insert the file text. The x before each substitution of seq is there because here-document tags must be valid PostgreSQL identifiers so they must start with a letter not a number. There's an escaped dollar sign at the start and end of each tag because PostgreSQL dollar quotes are of the form $taghere$quoted text$taghere$.
So when the script is invoked as bash testscript.sh difficult.txt the here document lands up expanding into something like:
INSERT INTO testfile(filecontent) VALUES (
$x0a305c82$Shell metacharacters like: $!(){}*?"'
SQL-significant characters like "'()$x0a305c82$
);
where the tags vary each time, making SQL injection exploits that rely on prematurely ending the quoting difficult.
I still advise you to use a real scripting language, but this shows that it is indeed possible.
The best thing to do is to create a temporary table, COPY those from the files in question, and then run your updates.
Your secondary option would be to create a function in a language like pl/perlu and do this in the stored procedure, but you will lose a lot of performance optimizations that you can do when you update from a temp table.

zsh filename globbling/substitution

I am trying to create my first zsh completion script, in this case for the command netcfg.
Lame as it may sound I have stuck on the first hurdle, disclaimer, I know how to do this crudely, however I seek the "ZSH WAY" to do this.
I need to list the files in /etc/networking but only the files, not the directory component, so I do the following.
echo $(ls /etc/network.d/*(.))
/etc/network.d/ethernet-dhcp /etc/network.d/wireless-wpa-config
What I wanted was:
ethernet-dhcp wireless-wpa-config
So I try (excuse my naivity) :
echo ${(s/*\/)$(ls /etc/network.d/*(.))}
/etc/network.d/ethernet-dhcp /etc/network.d/wireless-wpa-config
It seems that this doesn't work, I'm sure there must be some clever way of doing this by splitting into an array and getting the last part but as I say, I'm complete noob at this.
Any advice gratefully received.
General note: There is no need to use ls to generate the filenames. You might as well use echo some*glob. But if you want to protect the possible embedded newline characters even that is a bad idea. The first example below globs directly into an array to protect embedded newlines. The second one uses printf to generate NUL terminated data to accomplish the same thing without using a variable.
It is easy to do if you are willing to use a variable:
typeset -a entries
entries=(/etc/network.d/*(.)) # generate the list
echo ${entries#/etc/network.d/} # strip the prefix from each one
You can also do it without a variable, but the extra stuff to isolate individual entries is a bit ugly:
# From the inside, to the outside:
# * glob the entries
# * NUL terminate them into a single string
# * split at NUL
# * strip the prefix from each one
echo ${${(0)"$(printf '%s\0' /etc/network.d/*(.))"}#/etc/network.d/}
Or, if you are going to use a subshell anyway (i.e. the command substitution in the previous example), just cd to the directory so it is not part of the glob expansion (plus, you do not have to repeat the directory name):
echo ${(0)"$(cd /etc/network.d && printf '%s\0' *(.))"}
Chris Johnsen's answer is full of useful information about zsh, however it doesn't mention the much simpler solution that works in this particular case:
echo /etc/network.d/*(:t)
This is using the t history modifier as a glob qualifier.
Thanks for your suggestions guys, having done yet more reading of ZSH and coming back to the problem a couple of days later, I think I've got a very terse solution which I would like to share for your benefit.
echo ${$(print /etc/network.d/*(.)):t}
I'm used to seeing basename(1) stripping off directory components; also, you can use echo /etc/network/* to get the file listing without running the external ls program. (Running external programs can slow down completion more than you'd like; I didn't find a zsh-builtin for basename, but that doesn't mean that there isn't one.)
Here's something I hope will help:
haig% for f in /etc/network/* ; do basename $f ; done
if-down.d
if-post-down.d
if-pre-up.d
if-up.d
interfaces