Running Jobs

• Computers don't get bored, so get them to do boring things

Watching a Command

• The watch command runs a command periodically and displays result
  • Hard to show output statically…

$ watch -n 5 date
Every 5.0s: date              cherne: Mon Apr 22 16:11:48 2024

Mon Apr 22 16:11:53 EDT 2024

• -n 5: every five seconds
• Less distracting to show without title (-t)

$ watch -t -n 5 date
Mon Apr 22 16:11:53 EDT 2024

• More useful to show differences with -d
• Each successive update highlights the difference from the previous one
  • Again, hard to show statically
• Also use to use -g to exit when the command's output changes
• E.g., watch -n 1 -g netstat will exit within one second of network activity

Watching Files

• Use fswatch (file system watch)

$ fswatch -l 1 -x Created -x Removed /tmp

# touch /tmp/a.txt
/private/tmp/a.txt Created IsFile

# rm /tmp/a.txt
/private/tmp/a.txt Created IsFile Removed

• -l 1: latency of one second (i.e., how often to report)
• -x Created -x Removed: what events to watch for
• /tmp: look for any changes in this directory
• Get one line per change
  • Common to pipe the output of fswatch to something that parses these lines and acts on them
• FIXME: why does removing the file generate a 'Created' record?

And Then There's cron

• cron runs jobs at specified times
• Which sounds simple, but its interface is complex even by Unix standards
  • And differences between different machines make life even harder
• Most research programmers won't ever need it
• If you do, consult crontab.guru

Git Hooks

• Git stores repository data in .git
• Contains a directory called hooks
• Git automatically runs programs it finds there at particular times
  • E.g., if there is a program called pre-commit, Git runs it before each commit takes place
• What happens next depends on the program's exit exit status
  • 0: no problems
  • anything else: an error code of some sort

# Make a place for this example.
$ mkdir example
$ cd example

# Turn it into a Git repository.
$ git init .
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/tut/example/.git/

# Create a pre-commit script that always fails (i.e., exits with non-zero status).
$ cat > .git/hooks/pre-commit.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo "hook running"
exit 1

# Make that script executable.
$ chmod 755 .git/hooks/pre-commit.sh

# Run it and check its exit status.
$ .git/hooks/pre-commit.sh
hook running

$ echo $?
1

# Create some content.
$ cat > a.txt
content

# Try committing it.
# The hook should print "hook running" and the commit should be prevented.
$ git add a.txt

$ git commit -m "should not work"
hook running

$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
    modified:   a.txt

• More useful to check the files or something else

$ cat > .git/hooks/pre-commit
ruff check
exit $?

$ cat > a.py
x = not_defined

$ git add .
$ git commit
a.py:1:5: F821 Undefined name `not_defined`
Found 1 error.

$ cat > a.py
x = 0

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "this commit works"
All checks passed!
[main 7c01aee] this commit works
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

• Use ruff to lint the project's Python code
• Exit with whatever exit status it returned
  • $? is the exit status of the most recently run process in the shell

Managing These Examples

• Want to include the examples shown above in this repository and re-run them automatically
• But nesting Git repositories is tricky
• And re-running these commands and capturing all their output is also hard