[wplug] [wplug-announce] The Open Pitt, Issue 16

[Kevin Squire]

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 11:25:39 -0600 (MDT)
Vance Kochenderfer <vkochend at nyx.net> wrote:

> Debian
> Debian users love to point out that simply typing "apt-get update &&
> apt-get upgrade" at a root prompt will bring your system up to date. 
> Another option is Aptitude, a menu-driven (but still text-based)
> program that can handle all aspects of package management.  If you'd
> rather point and click, Synaptic provides an easy-to-use graphical
> interface. 
> Additional helpful tips can be found at
> <http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/241>.


To add my own two cents:  
I have the following script run daily on my Debian boxes.  Then if there
are any updates, it shows up in my email.  I would love to give credit
to where I found it, but I forgot to note it in the script, and of
course, now I don't remember.

BEGIN SCRIPT:
#!/bin/bash
#
# Script to produce an email whenever system needs updated
# line added to /etc/crontab to run this at 4:00 AM daily
#
# Update the package cache but don't spit anything out to stdout or
stderr;
# that way, if there's nothing to update we won't get a pointless mail
from
# cron ...

apt-get update 2>&1 > /dev/null

# Do a "trial" run of updating our packages (note the -s switch).
apt-get
# will report something along the lines of ...
#
# n packages upgraded, n newly installed, n to remove and n not upgraded
#
# Strip out the number of packages to upgrade via a bit of grepery and
# awkery ...

report=`apt-get -s upgrade | grep '^[0-9]\{1,\} upgraded'`
if [[ -z "$report" ]]; then
        exit 0          # Move on - there's nothing to do here
fi

to_upgrade=`echo $report | awk -F, '{print $0}' | awk '{print $1}' `
if [[ $to_upgrade -gt 0 ]]; then
      # We've got potential packages to upgrade, spit out our original
      # message from apt-get upgrade to force a mail to be sent for this
      # cron job ...
      echo "$report"
fi

exit 0

END SCRIPT

So now I don't have to worry about remembering to upgrade, just wait
till I get an email from cron :-)

Kevin

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