Tag Archives: bash

How to Find the Time Between two Unix Time Stamps

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This article explains how to find the time interval between two Unix time stamps. The default time format in Unix is like this: “Sun 9 Aug 12:50:08 BST 2020”. It appears in many places on the system and is the default produced by the “date” command.

For example, it might appear in application log files, like this::

Start time: Sun 9 Aug 10:05:00 BST 2020
End Time:   Sun 9 Aug 12:51:12 BST 2020

This article explains how to subtract one time from the other in Bash, and obtain the intervening time in seconds.

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Bash: Unescaped Left Brace in Regex

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A strange message was recently received from a Bash script running under Linux Mint 18:

Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%{ <-- HERE (.*?)}/ at /usr/bin/print line 528.
Error: no such file "test\n"

Slightly confusing, as it reads like a Perl error, rather than bash. Below is another variety of the same thing

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Bash Script Behaves Differently When Called From Cron

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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 →

Quick Script to Find Duplicate Files

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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.

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Process Substitution and Pipes

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Command substitution is a widely used feature of the Bash and Korn shells, allowing the output of one command to be captured and used in another. Like this:

$ echo "Backup started at $(date)"
Backup started at Fri Mar 16 15:35:14 GMT 2012

Command substitution is not to be confused with that less well known (and, to be honest, less useful) shell feature, process substitution. Despite being rarely used, process substitution is worth knowing about, if only because it illuminates other fundamental unix features – the shell, sub processes, named and unnamed pipes.

This post discusses process substitution, command substitution and the vertical bar (|). Three very different shell features, but all making use of unnamed pipes, and so not as different as they first appear. The examples are from Linux but also work on Solaris 10 and, due to the ubiquity of pipes, are likely to work on other unixes too. Continue reading →