My mind is just too accustomed to RDBMS engines to accept that I can't have GROUP BY in my shell pipes. So I wrote one groupby.pl.

Aside from fact that it somewhat looks like perl golfing (which I'm somewhat proud of), let's see how does it look:

dpavlin@llin:~/private/perl$ ps axv | ./groupby.pl 'sum:($6+$7+$8),10,count:10,min:($6+$7+$8),max:($6+$7+$8)' | sort -k1 -nr | head -10 | align

440947 /usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin        1 440947 440947

390913 /usr/sbin/apache2                    11  22207  39875

180943 /usr/bin/X                            1 180943 180943

135279 /usr/bin/pinot-dbus-daemon            1 135279 135279

122254 mocp                                  2  25131  97123

 84887 pinot                                 1  84887  84887

 78279 postgres:                             5  10723  21971

 70030 /usr/bin/perl                         6   6959  15615

 50213 /bin/bash                             7   6351   7343

 49266 /usr/lib/postgresql/8.2/bin/postgres  2  24631  24635

This will display total usage for process, it's name, number of such processes and range of memory usage. We can then use old friend sum.pl to produce console graph, but I already wrote about it.

So, let's move to another example, this time for OpenVZ. Let's see how much memory is each virtual machine using (and get number of processes for free):

$ vzps -E axv --no-headers | ./groupby.pl 'sum:($7+$8+$9*1024),1,count:1'

2209504127 0 265

611768242 212024 38

162484775 212037 19

170797534 212052 38

104853258 212226 26

712007227 212253 21

But wouldn't it be nice to display hostnames instead of VEID numbers? We can, using --join and --on options (which are really backticks on steroids):

$ vzps -E axv --no-headers | ./groupby.pl 'sum:($7+$8+$9*1024),1,count:1' --join 'sudo vzlist -H -o veid,hostname' --on 2                                 

2146263206 0 259

675835528 saturn.ffzg.hr 40

162484775 arh.rot13.org 19

170797534 koha-dev.rot13.org 38

104853258 koha.ffzg.hr 26

712011323 zemlja.ffzg.hr 21

Which brings us to final result:

$ vzps -E axv --no-headers | ./groupby.pl 'sum:($7+$8+$9*1024),1,count:1' --join 'sudo vzlist -H -o veid,hostname' --on 2 | sort -rn | align | ./sum.pl -h

0                  260   2105M OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO                  2105M

zemlja.ffzg.hr      21    679M OOOOOO-------------------            2784M

saturn.ffzg.hr      35    512M OOOO--------------------------       3296M

koha-dev.rot13.org  38    162M O------------------------------      3459M

arh.rot13.org       19    154M O--------------------------------    3614M

koha.ffzg.hr        26     99M ----------------------------------   3714M

So, here you have it: SQL like query language for your shell pipes.

Why does console refuse to die?
- It's because of pipes!

This post is result of my long addiction to console applications. Somehow, when I want to get a quick view of things on my system, I always turn to pipes and do something with them. In that process, I developed few of useful scripts for use within shell pipes, and I would like to introduce my readership to them.

PostgreSQL database size

When I want to see size of all databases on my system or size of tables in one database I turn to pg_size. It's a short and sweet script which will do a little shell magic (take a look in it) and display size of all databases on system (without any options) or size of all tables in database and number of rows (when used like pg_size database_name) like this:

dpavlin@llin:~$ pg_size dellstore2 | grep -v sql_
4890624 customers 20000
3153920 orderlines 60350
2678784 cust_hist 60350
991232 products 10000
966656 orders 12000
450560 inventory 10000
8192 categories 16
0 reorder 0

This is all nice and well, but doesn't really gives us the right overview, so move along for...

Nice console graphs

First, a caveat: this tools assumes that it will get number, space, and optional description. Output above seems to fit into this description, so let's try it:

dpavlin@llin:~$ COLUMNS=80 pg_size dellstore2 | grep -v sql_ | sum.pl -h
customers 20000    4776k OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO                                 4776k
orderlines 60350   3080k OOOOOOOOOO-----------------                      7856k
cust_hist 60350    2616k OOOOOOOOO---------------------------               10M
products 10000      968k OOO-------------------------------------           11M
orders 12000        944k OOO----------------------------------------        12M
inventory 10000     440k O-------------------------------------------       12M
categories 16      8192b ---------------------------------------------      12M
reorder 0              0 ---------------------------------------------      12M

This gives us nice output: description (followed by number of rows from above output), and running total of size in human readable form (if you don't like it, remove -h flag and you will get raw numbers).

Let's take another example (if you are still reading this and not interested in PostgreSQL database size). Let's see how much traffic did pppd transfer over very slow GPRS link on 8-day vacation:

dpavlin@llin:~$ grep 'pppd.*: Sent' /var/log/messages | awk '{ print $7 + $10 " " $1 " " $2 }' | sum.pl -h
May 5         0                                                               0
May 5       39k                                                             39k
May 5     7512k OO                                                        7551k
May 6     6352b --                                                        7558k
May 6       20k --                                                        7579k
May 6     1183k ---                                                       8762k
May 8     6869k OO---                                                       15M
May 8       70k -----                                                       15M
May 9     3596k O------                                                     18M
May 9     1998k -------                                                     20M
May 10      32M OOOOOOOOOOOO--------                                        53M
May 10      13k --------------------                                        53M
May 11      44M OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO--------------------                       98M
May 12      12M OOOO--------------------------------------                 111M
May 13    7120k OO-------------------------------------------              118M
May 13      20M OOOOOOO----------------------------------------------      139M

Much more interesting! A long time ago, I had a bunch of quick one-lines which used sum.pl to produce output from various other system counters, but somehow it got lost.

As I get only few comments on my blog, if you find this useful, leave one. I have few other examples, like the one which shows top 5 memory eaters on my system:

dpavlin@llin:~$ ps v | awk '{ print $8 " " $9 " " $10 }' | sort -rn | ~/private/perl/sum.pl | head -5
# RSS %MEM COMMAND
10.6 /usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin 165092 OOOOOOOOOOOOOO                165092
4.3 perl                             67240 OOOOOO---------------         232332
0.5 awesome                           8504 ---------------------         240836
0.4 irssi                             6632 ----------------------        247468
0.3 vi                                5888 ----------------------        253356

but, if this is not interested to my readership, tell me so, and I will stop spamming your already full RSS reader with console output! :-)