I constantly forget that I already have screen sessions available when I log in on Monday mornings. I don’t like that because it’s wasteful, but I’m just lazy enough that the thought alone isn’t enough to make me do something about it until now. So, to combat this, I whipped the script below as a reminder to use one of them, or get rid of them.

This will only fire when you are not already in a screen session, courtesy of the $WINDOW environment variable.

Add this to your ~/.bashrc

function list_screens() {
    if ! test $WINDOW;
    then
        echo
        echo "Current screen sessions available"
        screen -ls
    fi
}

list_screens

Yay! Now I can continue to be lazy!

You can find this and other junk over in my dotfiles at bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/benjaminws/dotfiles/

I’ve recently decided to evaluate other shell’s and ran across one that looked interesting: fish.

You can read more about fish: here and here

Based on what I’ve seen I’ve decided to try it out. Before I dive in too deep with fish, does anyone have any opinions, caveats, issues to mention about it?

If I don’t like it I’ll keep trying out zsh but most likely end up back in bash :)

So, I've noticed lately that one of my more popular blog entries has taken on some spam. I'll work on cleaning that up and implementing countermeasures.

In the mean time... I'm alive! Been working my tail off in preparation for Valentines day at work. It's the busiest time of the year for us. Just got back from VA where another sysadmin and I installed 50 new servers. It went well! Wrote some python to convert my inventory list from csv to our flat file format.

I've also been engineering a new syslogging system for our shop. It's a combination of a shell script that does archiving and checksum accounting, Splunk, and syslog-ng. Good times.

I've also had the (dis)pleasure of building RPM's lately....Not my favorite past-time. I really _really_ wish I could convince our team that the massive undertaking involved in converting from CentOS to debian would be worth it :). Not that I don't like CentOS, but I do love me some Debian.

That's all for now!