Terminal Inflection

In the spirit of ad hoc, sloppy hackery, here’s a trick I’ve used in the past for providing myself with an escape route when performing risky remote maintenance without a console. There’s nothing worse than irredeemably disconnecting your remote shell and causing yourself the catastrophe of a visit to the data centre, when you should be in the pub. Here’s a little way of taking out some insurance against the your fat fingers, using the “at” daemon.

Caveat: this is not best practice. The whole reason for adhering to sound strict principles of design is to avoid performing risky procedures which might require this kind of mitigation. Still, it doesn’t hurt to know.

The basic principle of this contrivance is to use the “at” daemon to run a back-out script as a kind of “dead man’s handle”. That is, if your hands come off the controls, this failsafe kicks in and puts things back the way they were – not careening out of control around a sharp bend.

The “at” command

The command at is a relatively unused little tool, despite having been a part of Linux since the beginning, probably. Its more organised uncle, cron, is the one everyone’s familiar with for automating recurring tasks, ad infinitum. But at is for executing one-offs, and so isn’t really an automation tool as such, since you still have to actually type whatever you want it to execute. But it adds a latency to the actual execution of that command and does it later on, when it’s more timely to do so. So it doesn’t save you any work, it just does it later so you don’t have to. You’re down the pub.
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