2014-05-01



In Thomas Koenig's at(1) (maybe in other implementations too) the
first  command  in an at script is changing the working directory
to the one the users was in when he submitted the job.   This  is
all  right  when  users use at to run some task in a few minutes,
but you run into problems if you use at for reminders  in  a  few
years: the working directory might not exist anymore.

I do use at for reminders about credit card expire dates and  the
like.  (I've  written  a small wrapper around at, called `wv', to
ease this task for me.) Today, I received a mail message that  at
wasn't able to change the directory, thus the job failed ... that
was it. Unfortunately, I don't even know *what* job  had  failed.
It's all gone. Yet, it wasn't even necessary to be in that parti-
culary directory, because all those jobs do is sending me a  rem-
inder email.

To solve the concrete problem for me,  my  wv  script  now  first
changes  to  the  root  directory before the mail reminder job is
submitted to at. But the problem in  at  remains.  It  should  at
least  attach the whole job script to the error mail, so that the
user is able to identify the job and run it by hand.



Wrote an awk script to print average values  of  text  input  and
convert timestamps to date strings:

     awk -F\; '
     NR>6 {
             sum=0;
             for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {
                     sum+=$i
             }
             "date +%y-%m-%d\\ %H:%M:%S -d @"$1 | getline d;
             printf("%s%.2f\n", d, sum/(i-1));
     } '

The input looks like this:

     1397858700;38.62;3.26;25.89;0.00;7.85;1.06;0.55;42.59
     1397859000;4.72;0.69;3.71;0.00;0.07;0.12;0.12;6.72



And finally, rss2email. I received these errors wheneven  no  new
entries were available:

     E: error in [7] "http://example.org/rss.xml" feed
             (no Content-type specified)

The XML however seemed to be valid. I had a look into the  source
code but found no clear problem. (I wasn't too eager to deal with
that XML stuff.) It looks  like  as  if  rss2email  distinguished
between  <description> and <content>, but the feeds use them just
as they like to. Some put all the text into <description> whereas
others  put it into <content>. Some of these cases (I haven't in-
vestigated which ones) produce these error  messages.   Interest-
ingly, they don't appear if there are new entries. Well!



http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>