Introduction

The language of the UNIX® command line is notoriously versatile: With a panorama of small tools and utilities and a shell to combine and execute them, you can specify many precise and complex tasks.

But when used in an office setting, these same tools can become a powerful ally toward increasing your productivity. Many techniques unique to UNIX can be applied to the issue of workplace efficiency.

This article gives several suggestions and techniques for bolstering office productivity at the command-line level: how to review your current system habits, how to time your work, secrets for manipulating dates, a quick and simple method of sending yourself a reminder, and a way to automate repetitive interactions.

Review your daily habits

The first step toward increasing your office productivity using the UNIX command line is to take a close look at your current day-to-day habits. The tools and applications you regularly use and the files you access and modify can give you an idea of what routines are taking up a lot of your time -- and what you might be avoiding.

Review the tools you use

You'll want to see what tools and applications you're using regularly. You can easily ascertain your daily work habits on the system with the shell's history built-in, which outputs an enumerated listing of the input lines you've sent to the shell in the current and past sessions. See Listing 1 for a typical example.

$ history
1 who
2 ls
3 cd /usr/local/proj
4 ls
5 cd websphere
6 ls
7 ls -l
$

The actual history is usually kept in a file so that it can be kept through future sessions; for example, the Korn shell keeps its command history hidden in the .sh_history file in the user's home directory, and the Bash shell uses .bash_history. These files are usually overwritten when they reach a certain length, but many shells have variables to set the maximum length of the history; the Korn and Bash shells have the HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE variables, which you can set in your shell startup file.

It can be useful to run history through sort to get a list of the most popular commands. Then, use awk to strip out the command name minus options and arguments, and pass the sorted list to uniq to give an enumerated list. Finally, call sort again to resort the list in reverse order (highest first) by the first column, which is the enumeration itself. Listing 2 shows an example of this in action.

$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -r

      4 ls
      2 cd
      1 who
$

If your history file is large, you can run periodic checks by piping to tail first -- for example, to check the last 1,000 commands, try:

$ history|tail -1000|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -r

Review the files you access or modify

Use the same principle to review the files that you've modified or accessed. To do this, use the find utility to locate and review all files you've accessed or changed during a certain time period -- today, yesterday, or at any date or segment of time in the past.

You generally can't find out who last accessed or modified a file, because this information isn't easily available under UNIX, but you can review your personal files by limiting the search to only files contained in your home directory tree. You can also limit the search to only files in the directory of a particular project that you're monitoring or otherwise working on.

The find utility has several flags that aid in locating files by time, as listed in Table 1. Directories aren't regular files but are accessed every time you list them or make them the current working directory, so exclude them in the search using a negation and the -type flag.

Here's how to list all the files in your home directory tree that were modified exactly one hour ago:

$ find ~ -mmin 60 \! -type d

Giving a negative value for a flag means to match that number or sooner. For example, here's how to list all the files in your home directory tree that were modified exactly one hour ago or any time since:

$ find ~ -mmin -60 \! -type d

Not all implementations of find support the min flags. If yours doesn't, you can make a workaround by using touch to create a dummy file whose timestamp is older than what you're looking for, and then search for files newer than it with the -newer flag:

$ date
Mon Oct 23 09:42:42 EDT 2006
$ touch -t 10230842 temp
$ ls -l temp
-rw-r--r--    1 joe        joe               0 Oct 23 08:42 temp
$ find ~ -newer temp \! -type d

The special -daystart flag, when used in conjunction with any of the day options, measures days from the beginning of the current day instead of from 24 hours previous to when the command is executed. Try listing all of your files, existing anywhere on the system, that have been accessed any time from the beginning of the day today up until right now:

$ find / -user `whoami` -daystart -atime -1 \! -type d

Similarly, you can list all the files in your home directory tree that were modified at any time today:

$ find ~ -daystart -mtime -1 \! -type d

Give different values for the various time flags to change the search times. You can also combine flags. For instance, you can list all the files in your home directory tree that were both accessed and modified between now and seven days ago:

$ find ~ -daystart -atime -7 -mtime -7  \! -type d

You can also find files based on a specific date or a range of time, measured in either days or minutes. The general way to do this is to use touch to make a dummy file or files, as described earlier.

When you want to find files that match a certain range, make two dummy files whose timestamps delineate the range. Then, use the -newer flag with the older file, and use "\! -newer" on the second file.

For example, to find all the files in the /usr/share directory tree that were accessed in August, 2006, try the following:

$ touch -d "Aug 1 2006" file.start
$ touch -d "Sep 1 2006" file.end
$ find /usr/share -daystart -newer file.start \! -daystart -newer file.end

Finally, it's sometimes helpful when listing the contents of a directory to view the files sorted by their time of last modification. Some versions of the ls tool have the -c option, which sorts by the time of file modification, showing the most recently modified files first. In conjunction with the -l (long-listing) and -t (sort by modification time) options, you can peruse a directory listing by the most recently modified files first; the long listing shows the file modification time instead of the default creation time:

$ ls -ltc /usr/local/proj/websphere | less

Time your work

Another useful means of increasing office productivity using UNIX is to time commands that you regularly execute. Then, you can evaluate the results and determine whether you're spending too much time waiting for a particular process to finish.

Time command execution

Is the system slowing you down? How long are you waiting at the shell, doing nothing, while a particular command is being executed? How long does it take you to run through your usual morning routine?

You can get concrete answers to these questions when you use the date, sleep, and echo commands to time your work.

To do this, type a long input line that first contains a date statement to output the time and date in the desired format (usually hours and minutes suffice). Then, run the command input line -- this can be several lines strung together with shell directives -- and finally, get the date again on the same input line. If the commands you're testing produce a lot of output, redirect it so that you can read both start and stop dates. Calculate the difference between the two dates:

$ date; system-backup > /dev/null; system-diag > /dev/null;\
> netstat > /dev/null; df > /dev/null; date

Test your typing speed

You can use these same principles to test your typing speed:

$ date;cat|wc -w;date

This command works best if you give a long typing sample that lasts at least a minute, but ideally three minutes or more. Take the difference in minutes between the two dates and divide by the number of words you typed (which is output by the middle command) to get the average number of words per minute you type.

You can automate this by setting variables for the start and stop dates and for the command that outputs the number of words. But to do this right, you must be careful to avoid a common error in calculation when subtracting times. A GNU extension to the date command, the %s format option, avoids such errors -- it outputs the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch, which is defined as midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. Then, you can calculate the time based on seconds alone.

Assign a variable, SPEED, as the output of an echo command to set up the right equation to pipe to a calculator tool, such as bc. Then, output a new echo statement that outputs a message with the speed:

$ START=`date +%s`;WORDS=`cat|wc -w`; STOP=`date +%s; SPEED=\
> `echo "$WORDS / ( ( $STOP - $START ) / 60 )"|bc`;echo \
> "You have a typing speed of $SPEED words per minute."

You can put this in a script and then change the permissions to make it executable by all users, so that others on the system can use it, too, as in Listing 3.

$ typespeedThe quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The quick brown dog--
                              ...
--jumped over the lazy fox.^D

You have a typing speed of 82.33333333 words per minute.
$

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Know your dates

The date tool can do much more than just print the current system date. You can use it to get the day of the week on which a given date falls and to get dates relative to the current date.

Get the day of a date

Another GNU extension to the date command, the -d option, comes in handy when you don't have a desk calendar nearby -- and what UNIX person bothers with one? With this powerful option, you can quickly find out what day of the week a particular date falls on by giving the date as a quoted argument:

$ date -d "nov 22"
Wed Nov 22 00:00:00 EST 2006
$

In this example, you see that November 22 of this year is on a Wednesday.

So, when it's suggested that the big meeting be held on November 22, you'll know right away that it falls on a Wednesday -- which is the day you're out in the field office.

Get relative dates

The -d option can also tell you what the date will be relative to the current date -- either a number of days or weeks from now, or before now (ago). Do this by quoting this relative offset as an argument to the -d option.

Suppose, for example, that you need to know the date two weeks hence. If you're at a shell prompt, you can get the answer immediately:

$ date -d '2 weeks'

There are other important ways to use this command. With the next directive, you can get the day of the week for a coming day:

$ date -d 'next monday'

With the ago directive, you can get dates in the past:

$ date -d '30 days ago'

And you can use negative numbers to get dates in reverse:

$ date -d 'dec 14 -2 weeks'

This technique is useful to give yourself a reminder based on a coming date, perhaps in a script or shell startup file, like so:

DAY=`date -d '2 weeks' +"%b %d"`
if test "`echo $DAY`" = "Aug 16"; then echo 'Product launch is now two weeks away!'; fi

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Give yourself reminders

Use the tools at your disposal to leave reminders for yourself on the system -- they take up less space than notes on paper, and you'll see them from anywhere you happen to be logged in.

Know when it's time to leave

When you're working on the system, it's easy to get distracted. The leave tool, common on the IBM AIX® operating system and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) systems (see Resources) can help.

Give leave the time when you have to leave, using a 24-hour format: HHMM. It runs in the background, and five minutes before that given time, it outputs on your terminal a reminder for you to leave. It does this again one minute before the given time if you're still logged in, and then at the time itself -- and from then on, it keeps sending reminders every minute until you log out (or kill the leave process). See Listing 4 for an example. When you log out, the leave process is killed.

$ leave
When do you have to leave? 1830
Alarm set for Fri Aug  4 18:30. (pid 1735)
$ date +"Time now: %l:%M%p"
Time now: 6:20PM
$
<system bell rings>
You have to leave in 5 minutes.
$ date +"Time now: %l:%M%p"
Time now: 6:25PM
$
<system bell rings>
Just one more minute!
$ date +"Time now: %l:%M%p"
Time now: 6:29PM
$
Time to leave!
$ date +"Time now: %l:%M%p"
Time now: 6:30PM
$
<system bell rings>
Time to leave!
$ date +"Time now: %l:%M%p"
Time now: 6:31PM
$ kill 1735
$ sleep 120; date +"Time now: %l:%M%p"
Time now: 6:33PM
$

You can give relative times. If you want to leave a certain amount of time from now, precede the time argument with a +. So, to be reminded to leave in two hours, type the following:

$ leave +0200

To give a time amount in minutes, make the hours field 0. For example, if you know you have only 10 more minutes before you absolutely have to go, type:

$ leave +0010

You can also specify the time to leave as an argument, which makes leave a useful command to put in scripts -- particularly in shell startup files. For instance, if you're normally scheduled to work until 5 p.m., but on Fridays you have to be out of the building at 4 p.m., you can set a weekly reminder in your shell startup file:

if test "`date +%a`" = "Fri"; then leave 1600; fi

You can put a plain leave statement, with no arguments, in a startup script. Every time you start a login shell, you can enter a time to be reminded when to leave; if you press the Enter key, giving no value, then leave exits without setting a reminder.

Send yourself an e-mail reminder

You can also send yourself a reminder using a text message. Sometimes it's useful to make a reminder that you'll see either later in your current login session or the next time you log in.

At one time, the old elm mail agent came bundled with a tool that enabled you to send memorandums using e-mail; it was basically a script that prompted for the sender, the subject, and the body text. This is easily replicated by the time-honored method of sending mail to yourself with the command-line mailx tool. (On some UNIX systems, mail is used instead of mailx.)

Give as an argument your e-mail address (or your username on the local system, if that's where you read mail); then, you can type the reminder on the Subject line when prompted, if it's short enough, as in Listing 5. If the reminder won't fit on the Subject line, type it in the body of the message. A ^D on a line by itself exits mailx and sends the mail.

$ mailx joe
Subject: Call VP on Monday^D
Cc:
Null message body; hope that's ok
$

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Automate your repetitive interactions

The Expect language (an extension of Tcl/Tk, but other variations are also available) is used to write scripts that run sessions with interactive programs, as if the script were a user interacting directly with the program.

Expect scripts can save you a great deal of time, particularly when you find yourself engaging in repetitive tasks. Expect can interact with multiple programs including shells and text-based Web browsers, start remote sessions, and run over the network.

For example, if you frequently connect to a system on your local intranet to run particular program -- the test-servers command, for instance -- you can automate it with an Expect script named servmaint, whose contents appear in Listing 6.

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
spawn telnet webserv4
expect "login:"
send "joe\r"
expect "Password:"
send "secret\r"
expect "webserv4>$"
send "test-servers\r"
expect "webserv4>$"
send "bye\r"
expect eof

Now, instead of going through the entire process of having to run telnet to connect to the remote system, log in with your username and password, run the command(s) on that system, and then log out. You just run the servmaint script as given in Listing 6; everything else is done for you. Of course, if you give a password or other proprietary information in such a script, there is a security consideration; at minimum, you should change the file's permissions so that you're the only user (besides the superuser) who can read it.

Any repetitive task involving system interaction can be programmed in Expect -- it's capable of branching, conditionals, and all other features of a high-level language so that the response and direction of the interaction with the program(s) can be completely automated.

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Conclusion

In an office setting, UNIX systems can handle many of the tasks that are normally handled by standalone computers running other operating systems -- and with their rich supply of command-line tools, they're capable of productivity boosters that can't be found anywhere else.

This article introduced several techniques and concepts to increase your office productivity using UNIX command-line tools and applications. You should be able to apply these ideas to your own office situations and, with a little command-line ingenuity, come up with even more ways to save time and be more productive.

Resources

Learn

• "Expect exceeds expectations" (developerWorks, April 2002): For a concise introduction to the Expect language, read Cameron Laird's article.
  
  
• "Hone your regexp pattern-building skills" (developerWorks, July 2006): This article gives examples of powerful, real-world regular expressions that can increase your office productivity.
  
  
• "Tcl your desktop" (developerWorks, June 2006): Make your work desktop uncluttered and efficient by following the steps outlined in this article.
  
  
• "Text processing with UNIX" (developerWorks, August 2006): This article demonstrates the power of UNIX command-line tools for processing text.
  
  
• "Working smarter, not harder" (developerWorks, August 2006): Part 2 of the "Speaking UNIX" series contains a primer on the history built-in.
  
  
• AIX and UNIX: Visit the developerWorks AIX and UNIX zone to expand your UNIX skills.
  
  
• New to AIX and UNIX: Visit the New to AIX and UNIX page to learn more about AIX and UNIX.
  
  
• developerWorks technical events and webcasts: Stay current with developerWorks technical events and webcasts.
  
  
• Podcasts: Tune in and catch up with IBM technical experts.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• leave utility: If your UNIX system doesn't come with the leave utility, you can download a free copy from netbsd.org.
  
  
• date tool: The GNU Project's implementation of the date tool contains an extension for outputting the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. Download a free copy from the GNU Project Web site.
  
  
• IBM trial software: Build your next development project with software for download directly from developerWorks.
  
  

Discuss

• Participate in the AIX and UNIX forums:
  • AIX 5L -- technical forum
  • AIX for Developers Forum
  • Cluster Systems Management
  • IBM Support Assistant
  • Performance Tools -- technical
  • Virtualization -- technical
  • More AIX and UNIX forums
  
  
• Participate in the developerWorks blogs and get involved in the developerWorks community.
  
  

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Table of contents

• Introduction
• Review your daily habits
• Time your work
• Know your dates
• Give yourself reminders
• Automate your repetitive interactions
• Conclusion
• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

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