Howto: Let the LED indicate ongoing backup jobs

[gonk]

I just hacked this simple solution to let the LED indicate if a backup job, either duplicity or rsync, is executing or not.

If you find it useful, use it, share it and maybe reply to this thread.
If you find room for improvement please post your version below.
If you have suggestions or questions... guess what to do.

/home/whatever_user/bin/led_color.sh

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#!/bin/bash

if (( `ps axu|egrep "duplicity|rsync"|grep -v egrep|grep -v daemon|wc -l` >0)); then echo "1";else echo "0";fi > /sys/bus/platform/devices/bubbatwo/color

In /etc/crontab

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#LED
#----------
# m     h  dom mon dow  user    command
*/1     *  *   *   *    root    /home/whatever_user/bin/led_color.sh

[Gordon]

Since the command you're running is a one-liner, why not put that one-liner directly i a cron file (I'd choose a separate file in /etc/cron.d rather than changing crontab directly).

Also you can search for specific process directly with `ps` using the -C option:

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ps -C duplicity,rsync

...and you can also tell `grep` to return the number of hits (which you can restrict to a maximum) rather than a string that contains the needle. Combining this you can write a command that will return either 1 or 0, depending on the existence of (any of) the searched for process(es):

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# for processes owned by root only
ps -C duplicity,rsync -f | grep -m 1 -c "^root"

# or if you want to include non root owned processes
ps -C duplicity,rsync -f --no-header| grep -m 1 -c .

The resulting cron file in /etc/cron.d thus looks as follows:

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#LED
#----------
# m     h  dom mon dow  user    command
*/1     *  *   *   *    root    echo $(ps -C duplicity,rsync -f | grep -m 1 -c "^root") > /sys/bus/platform/devices/bubbatwo/color

[gonk]

Thanks Gordon!

That's the kind of great collaborative work aimed at contributing and helping each others.