www.jhodges.co.uk » Bash

Recursively find the latest modified file

James — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:10:54 +0000

find . -printf "%CY-%Cm-%Cd %CH:%CM:%CS\t%p\n" | sort -nr | head -n 1

Count unique IP address in Apache’s access log

James — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:14:43 +0000

sed < /var/log/httpd/access_log -e 's/ .*$//' | sort | uniq -c

List files/folders ordered by size

James — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 11:13:45 +0000

du -s * | sort -n

Bash script to retry failed command

James — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:09:48 +0000

This was originally developed to retry an rsync command if a network error happened. It’s a mishmash of code found from around the net, and could probably be tidier but it gets the job done.

function retry {
   nTrys=0
   maxTrys=5
   status=256
   until [ $status == 0 ] ; do
      $1
      status=$?
      nTrys=$(($nTrys + 1))
      if [ $nTrys -gt $maxTrys ] ; then
            echo "Number of re-trys exceeded. Exit code: $status"
            exit $status
      fi
      if [ $status != 0 ] ; then
            echo "Failed (exit code $status)... retry $nTrys"
            sleep 300
      fi
   done
}

usage:

retry “echo success”
retry “cat /failed/”