sysbox

I copied the same idea in my static collection of sysadmin utilities: https://github.com/skx/sysbox/

I have a collection of small sysadming/scripting utilities distributed as a single binary here: https://github.com/skx/sysbox One of those is "splay" to sleep a random amount of time, before running a command. Very useful to avoid lots of things running across a fleet at the same time.

Yes, I first learned this and the name "splay" from CFengine, back in the day. I put together a small busybox-like collection of sysadmin tools, and one of the subcommands is "splay" to sleep for a random amount of time. It's one of those things that is useful surprisingly often, even outside cron. https://github.com/skx/sysbox

I remember in 1999 there was a project to reimplement a bunch of these tools in perl: https://perlpowertools.com/ I even contributed a little, back then. I guess writing basic versions of "ls", for example, is trivial. But there's a lot of work getting all the tools done, with all the flags implemented and behaving as expected. I guess there are tools like busybox, toybox, and similar, which also implement a lot of "stuff" to varying degrees of completion. From my side the biggest takeaway from those projects is the sheer convenience of deploying a single binary and installing symlinks to change functionality. I replicated something similar with my sysbox project, collecting tools together in one golang binary with various subcommands: https://github.com/skx/sysbox I use at least one of those tools on a daily basis, though I suspect the

If you've got perl installed you'll might have a "GET" binary present, mine is /usr/bin/GET, which comes with the WWW-module. Although this is written in portable perl, rather than being compiled, so the static vs. dynamic choice doesn't really mean much it is a simple alternative. Otherwise I built a simple busybox-inspired collection of tools, written in golang, which includes a simple HTTP client too: https://github.com/skx/sysbox Those are just a couple of examples, I'm certain there are multiple other choices out there. But I guess curl is ubiquitous enough that most people just use it directly, and add it when missing!

That's pretty cool. I wrote something similar in my static collection of sysadmin tools - https://github.com/skx/sysbox - In my simple pre-processor I only allow two special things: #include "file/goes/here" #execute ls -l | wc -l Though there is a more complex version included, which supports all the syntax of the golang text/template library which is more powerful.

I bundled together a small collection of sysadmin/scripting-tools here: https://github.com/skx/sysbox Those are probably amongst the things that I use most often which are non-standard.

I used to have very full ~/bin, and ~/$(hostname), directories. In the end I pared them back and started bundling things together in one binary. The end result is very similar to this approach, I run "sysbox blah", or "sysbox help", and use integrated subcommands. Very helpful and makes deployment easy by having only a single binary: https://github.com/skx/sysbox Not bash/shell, but similar and useful idea to experiment with.

I've written a small toolbox of "sysadmin stuff", for myself, which I find very useful. It includes a subcommand for YAML, JSON, and XML validation: https://github.com/skx/sysbox I've not considered a pretty-printer, but it isn't a bad idea to add such a thing.

Inspired by this project I put together sysadmin-tools: https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util Later they were replaced by a busy-box style collection of utilities written in golang (mostly to ease installation): https://github.com/skx/sysbox

By coincidence I added a trivial finger-server to my golang utility toolbox today: https://github.com/skx/sysbox Create ~/.plan and clients can query it remotely, just like in the old days.