Xaprb

Do you ever find yourself wanting to open several terminal windows and send the same commands to all of them? I’ve had this need many times, and I’ve never found a completely satisfactory solution. I’ve also known a lot of people who’ve written various sets of scripts to help them accomplish such tasks.

In no particular order, here are a few ways I’ve done this in the past:

1. Facebook’s pmysql client
2. The dsh tool
3. Several screen windows named remoteXXX, followed by a bash for-loop: while read cmd; do screen -X at remote# stuff "$cmd"; done
4. Using many PuTTY windows and the puttycs tool
5. Opening many tabs in KDE’s Kterm tool and selecting the options to send input to all tabs

Here are some I’ve heard about, but never used:

1. PolySH
2. rcall
3. A variety of “terminal multiplexor” web pages I’ve bookmarked

Of course, in many cases a technology like Chef or Puppet provides the true solution. But a lot of the MySQL users I’ve known haven’t grown to the point that they want to spend the upfront time and effort to learn and deploy something like that. They’re investing in development instead, and bearing the cost of a little less efficient systems administration process.

What’s your favorite technique for doing lots of things all at once?

I’ll be presenting at the Southern Computer Measurement Group’s meeting on Thursday. I’ll discuss how to extract scalability and performance metrics from TCP/IP packet headers. Registration is inexpensive, but it’s even less if you register by Monday. There is a full schedule of other good talks — it is an all-day meeting.

I recently set up the solarized color theme for my terminal emulator. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but procrastinated. However, I finally got really frustrated with the colors I get from “ls” sometimes — I use a dark terminal with light fonts, and the directory listings in particular can become invisible, with dark blue on black.

Solarized is much improved. All of the colors work well together and are easy on the eyes. What a relief! Recommended for programmers and system administrators. There are plugins or configuration files for a huge variety of programming environments and programs, including Vim of course.

I use XFCE’s terminal, and I found that there was no terminal configuration file for it in the download. But I found a workaround: just append the colors listed in this file to the end of $HOME/.config/Terminal/terminalrc.