A mixed week with minor tweaks
As previously mentioned I was looking to package pwsafe for Wheezy, as this is one of the few tools that I rely upon which isn't present.
There are now packages available, with the source on github.
I've also been doing some minor scripting because I've run into a few common problems recently:
- run-parts
run-parts is a simple utility which will run every executable in a directory, more or less.
In Debian-land run-parts is the mechanism for /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.hourly - and that is where I've had problems recently.
Imagine you run a backup via cron.daily. Further imagine that you run a post-backup rsync and that this might take many many hours. If your backup takes >=24 hours you're screwed.
To that end I've patched my run-parts tool to alert and exit if a prior invocation is still running.
- silent-run
I think everybody has this script - hide all output when running a command, unless the command fails. Looking today I see chronic from Joey's excellent moreutils does this. D'oh.
I think I've done more, but I cannot remember. In conclusion software is both easy and hard - easy because these two trivial changes were within my reach, but hard because years after encountering GNU/Linux we still have to add in the missing pieces.
Still could be worse, I spent four/five hours yesterday evening fighting with MS-SQL server, and that is time I'm never going to get back.