tail -f findings.out

I came across ack today, and now grep is sleeping outside. It’s very much like grep, except it assumes all the little things that you always wanted grep to remember, but that it never did. It actually left the light on for you, and put the toilet seat down.

Anyway, there were some rough bits with installation. On Ubuntu, it is installed by

If you think, hey, I will take the obvious path and install “ack”! You will be thinking with wrongitude. For

is, in fact, a Kanji code converter, which I discovered after not a little anger. On RHEL, CentOS, and the like, you have to install with

Once installed, just try some

Want to ignore .svn dirs? It already did. Want to recursively search? It already did. And it brought over a bag of chips. Read the Top 10 for more goodies.

Oh, and don’t forget to add

to exit your shell scripts:

I stumbled across a wonderful program today: cowsay! It is just as cool as you would imagine:

gives you an ASCII art cow saying your Text.

I think I will use it as the welcome banner on all my servers:

I discovered a wonderful utility last night: nast. I wanted to scan my local network, just to see what devices were on it, what their addresses were, etc. I could ping my entire subnet, but what if I had a machine that rejected ICMP packets? (Not that I do very often, but it can happen in larger environments). I thought using a protocol like ARP would be much more robust, since it is pretty much guaranteed to be available. Then I discovered nast.

nast can do a lot of neat things. The first I found was mapping a subnet of course, which you can do by running

This returns something like:

nast can also try to find out if there are any nodes on your subnet acting in promiscuous mode, which I think is pretty hot. Check out the main nast page for the full feature set.

In my searching, I also came across fping. Its main improvements over regular old ping are:

• More than one host can be passed (as well as a file containing hosts)
• Output is very simple and easy to parse, making it ideal for scripting
• Tries each host and moves on if there is no response, making the whole process faster

Instead of

you can just run

which just returns

Both nast and fping are available in the Ubuntu repos.

I have been experimenting with adding more color to my bash prompts of late. I find it easier to read when the fields are in distinct colors. The problem I always have is remembering what those wonderfully obscure ANSI escape sequences represent. I always have to look at a table to remind myself that “light red” maps to “1;31″.

In an interesting guide to configuring your bash prompt that I have been going through, there was a script listed that makes this much easier:

This is from the Bash Prompt HOWTO, from a script by Daniel Crisman. It produces the following when run:

Just add an alias like

, and you can be reminded whenever you like.

I am still experimenting with my prompt colors, but differentiating the fields I find useful has made things a lot easier:

Any linux distribution around these days will have compression and rotation in place for files in

(or wherever else they happen to go). So if you look in there, you will see one or two log files (current and the last one) for each process logged, as well as 3-7 compressed files for the same process. These then get rotated out.

In any case, say you want to look inside one of those compressed log files. You could write out an untar command and then view the file. Then have to delete the temporary file. Messy. There is a better way.

The first I found was interesting (from PuppyLinux): Simply run

. You view the contents of the file with the man file viewer. The annoying thing is that is does funny things with line breaks.

A much better way:

. You view the file in less, and when done, there is no temp file to delete. To make it faster, just add a simple alias:

. This makes viewing those compressed logfiles as painless as viewing the current ones.