commands

Logging Commands

by Ulysses · Feb 22, 2021

I decided to log my commands for good record keeping. Here’s my script.

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then echo 'No arguments. Format: ./go.sh script.sh'; exit 0; fi
log=log.txt
echo '-------------------------------' >> $log
date >> $log
echo '---' >> $log
cat $1 >> $log
echo '---' >> $log
/bin/bash $1 2>&1 | tee -a $log

To run.

./go.sh script.sh

Line by line explanation.

Checks for script to run. Exits if there’s no argument.
Sets the log file.
Prints dashes.
Prints the date.
Print 3 dashes.
Prints the commands to the log file.
Print 3 dashes.
Run the command. Send error and standard out to log file.

Running MySQL commands from the Terminal

by Ulysses · Nov 29, 2020

You can run MySQL commands from the terminal by using -e switch. Here are a few examples.

mysql -u username -p -e "create database mydb"
mysql -u username -p -e "use mydb"
mysql -u username -p database -e "select * from mytable"

If you have .mycnf configured, you can omit the username and password.

mysql -e "create database mydb"
mysql -e "use mydb"
mysql -e "select * from mytable"

To run multiple commands from a single line, separate the commands using a semicolon.

mysql -e "create database somedb; use mydb; select * from mytable;"

Typically you will run Ansible using playbooks, just like the playbook that I ran from the previous post to patch a bunch of servers all at once. In addition to running playbooks, you can also run single ad hoc commands to a server or to a group of servers. Below are a few examples of that.

First, here’s my /etc/ansible/hosts file.

[servers]
server1
server2
[webservers]
server3
server4
[appservers]
server5
server6
[dbservers]
server7
server8

Here are the commands.

ansible servers -m ping
ansible webservers -m command -a "df -h"
ansible appservers -m command -a "crontab -l"
ansible dbservers -m command -a "cat /etc/hosts"
ansible all -m command -a "cat /etc/passwd"
ansible webservers -m command -a "systemctl status apache2"
ansible appservers -m command -a 'uptime'

The first command runs ping on server1 and server2. The second command displays disk information of server3 and server4. The third command displays the crontab of server5 and server6, and so on and on. You get the drift.