Author: Ryan

Bash snippet, verify ctrl+c

Ryanbash, ctrl+c, trap

Lately I’ve been working on a pair of more elaborate scripts using ncat and openssl to transfer data between hosts. I’ll get around to posting it eventually, but until then a few small snippets that people may find useful.

Today we will catch ctrl+c and ask the user if he really want’s to terminate the script.

The initialize() and cleanup() are my usual function names I have in every script, making sure general settings and variables are defined and that on exit any tempfiles get deleted.
What has been added was a trap for the INT signal (ctrl+c) which calls the verify_quit() function, giving the user 10 seconds to press ctrl+c again to exit (via cleanup()) or return back to wherever we were in the code. There is one unavoidable caveat, the first ctrl+c will kill whatever the script was doing before it jumps into the verify_quit() function.

Simple “try” function for bash

Ryanbash

Made a nice little try() function today for simplifying checking/dealing with  return codes from commands. It uses the function text() I posted earlier to colorfy output: How to easily add colored text output in bash scripts. The function accepts 2 parameters, how it should behave if a problem occurs and the command to be executed: try <silent|warn|fatal> command

silent: save the return status in the global variable command_status
warn: if the command has a return code > 0, print a warning and save the return status in the global variable command_status
fatal: if the command has a return code > 0, print an error and exit

Obviously not as versatile as a python try/except, bu streamlines verifying the command return codes.
Example Usage:

Output
Warning: ‘false‘ failed with return code –1–
ls: cannot access doesnotexist: No such file or directory
Error: ‘ls -al doesnotexist‘ failed with return code –2–

File: error_handling.sh

Virtualbox to 4.2.12 problems with Ubuntu

Ryan12.04, 12.10, 4.2.10, 4.2.12, ubuntu, virtualbox

After updating Virtualbox to 4.2.12 and updating the guest additions on my Ubuntu 12.10 the guest suddenly started having problems with the graphics driver (X.org wouldn’t start correctly, only starts in “rescue” mode). I did a bit of googling, and it seems other users are also affected (mainly 12.04 and 12.10 Ubuntu), and it seems to affect people who upgraded from virtualbox guest addditions 4.2.10 -> 4.2.12

Here the quick and dirty workaround to the problem: download the 4.2.10 guest additions and use them.

Will need to reboot or make sure the new modules are loaded and restart X afterwards.

Script to start minion in tmux

Ryanbash, minion, scripting, security, tmux

Minion is a security project from Mozilla (link). It provides a user-friendly web interface to various security scanner tools. There is a webcast demonstrating the software (link).

The software requires a few services to run, and since I like having one script take care of starting everything with the right parameters, I threw together a simple shell script that sets up a tmux session with the services started in windows with the names of the services.