Bash Script Behaves Differently When Called From Cron

Unix users and administrators will be familiar with the cron, unix’s built in job scheduler. It is a good way of running regular jobs eg backups, system monitoring programs or housekeeping scripts. The configuration of cron is quite particular and care is needed when setting up a new job. Your well tested script can behave differently when it is called from cron. Sometimes the differences won’t matter. But sometimes they do, and finding the cause can be tricky.

This brief article describes how many such problems can be tracked down simply by capturing the standard error output properly. In short, make sure your troublesome cron job is not quietly discarding the very information you need to fix it. Continue reading

Simple Picture Gallery on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a small Linux computer designed to help children learn programming. Being a full Linux System, it can also be used as a server or as the basis for various projects. The Pi’s low power consumption makes it particularly suited to the role of always-on web server.

This post describes how to create a simple photo gallery on the Pi, which can be shared over the internet with or without password protection. While not as polished as Flickr, Smugmug or similar services, it allows you to retain ownetship, control and security of the shared images. Continue reading

An Example of Parallel Processing

This post shows how to use parallel processing to get a CPU intensive job done faster in Unix/Linux. By splitting a large task into several parts, it is quite easy to give each part to a separate CPU, and complete the task many times faster than it would on a single processor.

These days, even small PCs and other devices often come equipped with several CPU cores. But some tasks will use only one core, sometimes using 100% of it, while other cores stand by idle. Sometimes this is a waste of resources. Continue reading

Quick Script to Find Duplicate Files

Here’s a quick script to show duplicate files on Linux. It should cope with arbitrary spaces in file names, and to save time and CPU resources, it will checksum only files of the same size.

Usage: Save the script to dups.sh or whatever, then run it with no arguments. A list of duplicated files is output.

Continue reading