How can I automate commands that I run every day on Linux?

Question

Every morning, I SSH into a particular server. I check disk space, size of a few directories, and the contents of some specific directories.

All of this involves a lot of typing and recall (of directory locations) when I am not at my most awake.

Is there a smarter way of doing this... some kind of script that takes out some of the manual typing that I do every morning?

Answer 1

You could probably do the majority of that from a bash script, yes. And get it to run every day by putting it in cron.daily, or your distro's equivalent.

Conceptually, you can call the same commands from the script as you do manually, but you'll probably want to redirect the output to append a temporary file, and then sendmail the contents of that file to yourself once done so you can just read the summary.

Answer 2

After one of your daily sessions, just pipe the output of history | cut -c 8- to a file and then clean it up.

history | cut -c 8- > dailystatuscheck.sh

You'll want to add redirects to append any output from each individual command into a file and then and then add a line to email the file to yourself. Then simply add the script you created to cron.daily after testing it.

before:

df -h
cd /var/log
grep ERROR *.log

after:

df -h >> /tmp/$$.log
cd /var/log >> /tmp/$$.log
grep ERROR *.log >> /tmp/$$.log
mail -s "Daily Status" me@example.com << $$.log
rm $$.log

If you are feeling particularly lazy (one of the virtues of a good programmer ;-) add some processing to determine if action is needed. i.e. If free space is less than 90% alert you immediately or mark the email urgent.

Answer 3

Sure, you can write a shell script and save it on the remote server to automate these kind of work. Check out some bash scripting tutorials with Google. Then you can just ssh into the server and run the script.