Advanced Linux-related things – Page 3

Password hashing with MD5-crypt in relation to MD5

If you haven’t reinstalled recently, chances are you’re using MD5-based passwords. However, the password hashes you find in /etc/shadow look nothing like what md5sum returns.

Here’s an example:

/etc/shadow:
$1$J7iYSKio$aEY4anysz.gtXxg7XlL6v1

md5sum:
7c6483ddcd99eb112c060ecbe0543e86

What’s the difference in generating these hashes? Why are they different at all?

Just running md5sum on a password and storing that is just marginally more secure than storing the plaintext password.

Thanks to GPGPUs, a modern gaming rig can easily try 5 billion such passwords per second, or go over the entire 8-character alphanumeric space in a day. With rainbow tables, a beautiful time–space tradeoff, you can do pretty much the same in 15 minutes.

MD5-crypt employs salting to make precomputational attacks exponentially more difficult. Additionally, it uses stretching to make brute force attacks harder (but just linearly so).

As an aside, these techniques were used in the original crypt from 1979, so there’s really no excuse to do naive password hashing anymore. However, at that time the salt was 12 bits and the number of rounds 25 — quite adorable in comparison with today’s absolute minimum of 64 bits and 1000 rounds.

The original crypt was DES based, but used a modified algorithm to prevent people from using existing DES cracking hardware. MD5-crypt doesn’t do any such tricks, and can be implemented in terms of any MD5 library, or even the md5sum util.

As regular reads might suspect, I’ve written a shell script to demonstrate this: md5crypt. There are a lot of workarounds for Bash’s inability to handle NUL bytes in strings. It takes 10 seconds to generate a hash, and is generally awful..ly funny!

Let’s first disect a crypt hash. man 3 crypt has some details.

If salt is a character string starting with the characters
"$id$" followed by a string terminated by "$":

       $id$salt$encrypted

then instead of using the DES machine, id  identifies  the
encryption  method  used  and this then determines how the
rest of the password string is interpreted.  The following
values of id are supported:

       ID  | Method
       -------------------------------------------------
       1   | MD5
       2a  | Blowfish (on some Linux distributions)
       5   | SHA-256 (since glibc 2.7)
       6   | SHA-512 (since glibc 2.7)

Simple and easy. Split by $, and then your fields are Algorithm, Salt and Hash.

md5-crypt is a function that takes a plaintext password and a salt, and generate such a hash.

To set a password, you’d generate a random salt, input the user’s password, and write the hash to /etc/shadow. To check a password, you’d read the hash from /etc/shadow, extract the salt, run the algorithm on this salt and the candidate password, and then see if the resulting hash matches what you have.

md5-crypt can be divided into three phases. Initialization, loop, and finalization. Here’s a very high level description of what we’ll go through in detail:

Generate a simple md5 hash based on the salt and password
Loop 1000 times, calculating a new md5 hash based on the previous hash concatenated with alternatingly the password and the salt.
Use a special base64 encoding on the final hash to create the password hash string

Put like this, it relatively elegant. However, there are a lot of details that turn this from elegant to eyerolling.

Here’s the real initialization.

Let “password” be the user’s ascii password, “salt” the ascii salt (truncated to 8 chars), and “magic” the string “$1$”
Start by computing the Alternate sum, md5(password + salt + password)
Compute the Intermediate₀ sum by hashing the concatenation of the following strings:
1. Password
2. Magic
3. Salt
4. length(password) bytes of the Alternate sum, repeated as necessary
5. For each bit in length(password), from low to high and stopping after the most significant set bit
  - If the bit is set, append a NUL byte
  - If it’s unset, append the first byte of the password

I know what you’re thinking, and yes, it’s very arbitrary. The latter part was most likely a bug in the original implementation, carried along as UNIX issues often are. Remember to stay tuned next week, when we’ll compare this to SHA512-crypt as used on new installations!

From this point on, the calculations will only involve the password, salt, and Intermediate₀ sum. Now we loop 1000 times, to stretch the algorithm.

For i = 0 to 999 (inclusive), compute Intermediate_i+1 by concatenating and hashing the following:
1. If i is even, Intermediate_i
2. If i is odd, password
3. If i is not divisible by 3, salt
4. If i is not divisible by 7, password
5. If i is even, password
6. If i is odd, Intermediate_i
At this point you don’t need Intermediate_i anymore.

You will now have ended up with Intermediate₁₀₀₀. Let’s call this the Final sum. Since MD5 is 128bit, this is 16 bytes long.

The bytes will be rearranged, and then encoded as 22 ascii characters with a special base64-type encoding. This is not the same as regular base64:

Normal base64 set:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/

Crypt base64 set:
./0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Additionally, there is no padding. The leftover byte will be encoded into 2 base64 ascii characters.

Output the magic
Output the salt
Output a “$” to separate the salt from the encrypted section
Pick out the 16 bytes in this order: 11 4 10 5 3 9 15 2 8 14 1 7 13 0 6 12.
- For each group of 6 bits (there are 22 groups), starting with the least significant
  - Output the corresponding base64 character with this index

Congratulations, you now have a compatible md5-crypt hash!

As you can see, it’s quite far removed from a naive md5(password) attempt.

Fortunately, one will only ever need this algorithm for compatibility. New applications can use the standard PBKDF2 algorithm, implemented by most cryptography libraries, which does the same thing only in a standardized and parameterized way.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the next post next week will be more of the same, but with SHA512-crypt!

Why Bash is like that: Signal propagation

Bash can seem pretty random and weird at times, but most of what people see as quirks have very logical (if not very good) explanations behind them. This series of posts looks at some of them.

How do I simulate pressing Ctrl-C when running this in a script:
while true; do echo sleeping; sleep 30; done

Are you thinking “SIGINT, duh!”? Hold your horses!

I tried kill -INT pid, but it doesn’t work the same: Ctrl-C kills the sleep and the loop SIGINTing the shell does nothing (but only in scripts: see Errata)

SIGINTing sleep makes the loop continue with the next iteration

HOWEVER, if I run the script in the background and kill -INT %1 instead of kill -INT pid, THEN it works :O

Why does Ctrl-C terminate the loop, while SIGINT doesn’t?

Additionally, if I run the same loop with ping or top instead of sleep, Ctrl-C doesn’t terminate the loop either!

Yeah. Well… Yeah…

This behaviour is due to an often overlooked feature in UNIX: process groups. These are important for getting terminals and shells to work the way they do.

A process group is exactly what it sounds like: a group of processes. They have a leader, which is the process that created it using setpgrp(2). The leader’s pid is also the process group id. Child processes are in the same group as their parent by default.

Terminals keep track of the foreground process group (set by the shell using tcsetpgrp(3)). When receiving a Ctrl-C, they send the SIGINT to the entire foreground group. This means that all members of the group will receive SIGINT, not just the immediate process.

kill -INT %1 sends the signal to the job’s process group, not the backgrounded pid! This explains why it works like Ctrl-C.

You can do the same thing with kill -INT -pgrpid. Since the process group id is the same as the process group leader, you can kill the group by killing the pid with a minus in front.

But why do you have to kill both?

When the shell is interrupted, it will wait for the running command to exit. If this child’s status indicates it exited abnormally due to that signal, the shell cleans up, removes its signal handler, and kills itself again to trigger the OS default action (abnormal exit). Alternatively, it runs the script’s signal handler as set with trap, and continues.

If the shell is interrupted and the child’s status says it exited normally, then Bash assumes the child handled the signal and did something useful, so it continues executing. Ping and top both trap SIGINT and exit normally, which is why Ctrl-C doesn’t kill the loop when calling them.

This also explains why interrupting just the shell does nothing: the child exits normally, so the shell thinks the child handled the signal, though in reality it was never received.

Finally, if the shell isn’t interrupted and a child exits, Bash just carries on regardless of whether the signal died abnormally or not. This is why interrupting the sleep just continues with the loop.

In case one would like to handle such cases, Bash sets the exit code to 128+signal when the process exits abnormally, so interrupting sleep with SIGINT would give the exit code 130 (kill -l lists the signal values).

Bonus problem:

I have this C app, testpg:
int main() {
    setsid();
    return sleep(10);
}

I run bash -c './testpg' and press Ctrl-C. The app is killed. Shouldn't testpg be excluded from SIGINT, since it used setsid?

A quick strace unravels this mystery: with a single command to execute, bash execve’s it directly — a little optimization trick. Since the pid is the same and already had its own process group, creating a new one doesn’t have any effect.

This trick can’t be used if there are more commands, so bash -c './testpg; true' can’t be killed with Ctrl-C.

Errata:

Wait, I started a loop in one terminal and killed the shell in another. 
The loop exited!

Yes it did! This does not apply to interactive shells, which have different ways of handling signals. When job control is enabled (running interactively, or when running a script with bash -m), the shell will die when SIGINTed

Here’s the description from the bash source code, jobs.c:2429:

  /* Ignore interrupts while waiting for a job run without job control
     to finish.  We don't want the shell to exit if an interrupt is
     received, only if one of the jobs run is killed via SIGINT. 
   ...

Why Bash is like that: suid

Bash can seem pretty random and weird at times, but most of what people see as quirks have very logical (if not very good) explanations behind them. This series of posts looks at some of them.

Why can't bash scripts be SUID?

Bash scripts can’t run with the suid bit set. First of all, Linux doesn’t allow any scripts to be setuid, though some other OS do. Second, bash will detect being run as setuid, and immediately drop the privileges.

This is because shell script security is extremely dependent on the environment, much more so than regular C apps.

Take this script, for example, addmaildomain:

#!/bin/sh
[[ $1 ]] || { man -P cat $0; exit 1; } 

if grep -q "^$(whoami)\$" /etc/accesslist
then
    echo "$1" > /etc/mail/local-host-names
else
    echo "You don't have permissions to add hostnames"
fi

The intention is to allow users in /etc/accesslist to run addmaildomain example.com to write new names to local-host-names, the file which defines which domains sendmail should accept mail for.

Let’s imagine it runs as suid root. What can we do to abuse it?

We can start by setting the path:

echo "rm -rf /" > ~/hax/grep && chmod a+x ~/hax/grep
PATH=~/hax addmaildomain

Now the script will run our grep instead of the system grep, and we have full root access.

Let’s assume the author was aware of that, had set PATH=/bin:/usr/bin as the first line in the script. What can we do now?

We can override a library used by grep

gcc -shared -o libc.so.6 myEvilLib.c
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. addmaildomain

When grep is invoked, it’ll link with our library and run our evil code.

Ok, so let’s say LD_LIBRARY_PATH is closed up.

If the shell is statically linked, we can set LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS=true. This will cause dynamically linked executables to print out a list of library dependencies and return true. This would cause our grep to always return true, subverting the test. The rest is builtin and wouldn’t be affected.

Even if the shell is statically compiled, all variables starting with LD_* will typically be stripped by the kernel for suid executables anyways.

There is a delay between the kernel starting the interpretter, and the interpretter opening the file. We can try to race it:

while true
do
    ln /usr/bin/addmaildomain foo
    nice -n 20 ./foo &
    echo 'rm -rf /' > foo
done

But let’s assume the OS uses a /dev/fd/* mechanism for passing a fd, instead of passing the file name.

We can rename the script to confuse the interpretter:

ln /usr/bin/addmaildomain ./-i
PATH=.
-i

Now we’ve created a link, which retains suid, and named it “-i”. When running it, the interpretter will run as “/bin/sh -i”, giving us an interactive shell.

So let’s assume we actually had “#!/bin/sh –” to prevent the script from being interpretted as an option.

If we don’t know how to use the command, it helpfully lists info from the man page for us. We can compile a C app that executes the script with “$0” containing “-P /hax/evil ls”, and then man will execute our evil program instead of cat.

So let’s say “$0” is quoted. We can still set MANOPT=-H/hax/evil.

Several of these attacks were based on the inclusion of ‘man’. Is this a particularly vulnerable command?

Perhaps a bit, but a whole lot of apps can be affected by the environment in more and less dramatic ways.

POSIXLY_CORRECT can make some apps fail or change their output
LANG/LC_ALL can thwart interpretation of output
LC_CTYPE and LC_COLLATE can modify string comparisons
Some apps rely on HOME and USER
Various runtimes have their own paths, like RUBY_PATH, LUA_PATH and PYTHONPATH
Many utilities have variables for adding default options, like RUBYOPT and MANOPT
Tools invoke EDITOR, VISUAL and PAGER under various circumstances

So yes, it’s better not to write suid shell scripts. Sudo is better than you at running commands safely.

Do remember that a script can invoke itself with sudo, if need be, for a simulated suid feel.

So wait, can’t perl scripts be suid?

They can indeed, but there the interpretter will run as the normal user and detect that the file is suid. It will then run a suid interpretter to deal with it.

What’s in a SSH RSA key pair?

You probably have your own closely guarded ssh key pair. Chances are good that it’s based on RSA, the default choice in ssh-keygen.

RSA is a very simple and quite brilliant algorithm, and this article will show what a SSH RSA key pair contains, and how you can use those values to play around with and encrypt values using nothing but a calculator.

RSA is based on primes, and the difficulty of factoring large numbers. This post is not meant as an intro to RSA, but here’s a quick reminder. I’ll use mostly the same symbols as Wikipedia: you generate two large primes, p and q. Let φ = (p-1)(q-1). Pick a number e coprime to φ, and let d ≡ e^-1 mod φ.

The public key is then (e, n), while your private key is (d, n). To encrypt a number/message m, let the ciphertext c ≡ m^e mod n. Then m ≡ c^d mod n.

This is very simple modular arithmetic, but when you generate a key pair with ssh-keygen, you instead get a set of opaque and scary looking files, id_rsa and id_rsa.pub. Here’s a bit from the private key id_rsa (no passphrase):

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- MIIBygIBAAJhANj3rl3FhzmOloVCXXesVPs1Wa++fIBX7BCZ5t4lmMh36KGzkQmn jDJcm+O9nYhoPx6Bf+a9yz0HfzbfA5OpqQAyC/vRTVDgHhGXY6HFP/lyWQ8DRzCh tsuP6eq9RYHnxwIBIwJhAKdf+4oqqiUWOZn//vXrV3/19LrGJYeU

... -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

How can we get our nice RSA parameters from this mess?

The easy way is with openssl: (I apologize in advance for all the data spam in the rest of the article).

vidar@vidarholen ~/.ssh $ openssl rsa -text -noout < id_rsa Private-Key: (768 bit) modulus: 00:d8:f7:ae:5d:c5:87:39:8e:96:85:42:5d:77:ac: 54:fb:35:59:af:be:7c:80:57:ec:10:99:e6:de:25: ... publicExponent: 35 (0x23) privateExponent: 00:a7:5f:fb:8a:2a:aa:25:16:39:99:ff:fe:f5:eb: 57:7f:f5:f4:ba:c6:25:87:94:48:64:93:fb:3d:a7: ... prime1: ... prime2: ... exponent1: ... exponent2: ... coefficient: ...

Here, modulus is n, publicExponent is e, privateExponent is d, prime1 is p, prime2 is q, exponent1 is d_P from the Wikipedia article, exponent2 is d_Q and coefficient is q_Inv.

Only the first three are strictly required to perform encryption and decryption. The latter three are for optimization and the primes are for verification.

It’s interesting to note that even though the private key from RSA’s point of view is (d,n), the OpenSSH private key file includes e, p, q and the rest as well. This is how it can generate public keys given the private ones. Otherwise, finding e given (d,n) is just as hard as finding d given (e,n), except e is conventionally chosen to be small and easy to guess for efficiency purposes.

If we have one of these hex strings on one line, without colons, and in uppercase, then bc can work on them and optionally convert to decimal.

# If you don't want to do this yourself, see end for a script vidar@vidarholen ~/.ssh $ { echo 'ibase=16'; cat | tr -d ':\n ' | tr a-f A-F; echo; } | bc 00:d8:f7:ae:5d:c5:87:39:8e:96:85:42:5d:77:ac: 54:fb:35:59:af:be:7c:80:57:ec:10:99:e6:de:25: 98:c8:77:e8:a1:b3:91:09:a7:8c:32:5c:9b:e3:bd: .... Ctrl-d to end input 13158045936463264355006370413708684112837853704660293756254884673628\ 63292...

We also need a power-modulo function, since b^e % m is unfeasibly slow if you go by way of b^e. Luckily, bc is programmable.

vidar@vidarholen ~/.ssh $ bc bc 1.06.94 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'.

# Our powermod function: define pmod(b,e,m) { if(e == 0 ) return 1; if(e == 1) return b%m; rest=pmod(b^2%m,e/2,m); if((e%2) == 1) return (b*rest)%m else return rest; }
#Define some variables (this time unabbreviated) n=13158045936463264355006370413708684112837853704660293756254884673628\ 63292777770859554071108633728590995985653161363101078779505801640963\ 48597350763180843221886116453606059623113097963206649790257715468881\ 4303031148479239044926138311 e=35 d=10150492579557375359576342890575270601332058572166512326253768176799\ 23111571423234513140569517447770196903218153051479115016036905320557\ 80231250287900874055062921398102953416891810163858645414303785372309\ 5688315939617076008144563059 # Encrypt the number 12345 c=pmod(12345, e, n) # Show the encrypted number c 15928992191730477535088375321366468550579140816267293144554503305092\ 03492035891240033089011563910196180080894311697511846432462334632873\ 53515625
#Decrypt the number pmod(c, d, n) 12345

Yay, we’ve successfully encrypted and decrypted a value using real life RSA parameters!

What’s in the public key file, then?

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAGEA2PeuXcWHOY6WhUJdd6xU+zVZr758gFfsEJnm3iWYyHfoobORCaeMMlyb472diGg/HoF/5r3LPQd/Nt8Dk6mpADIL+9FNUOAeEZdjocU/+XJZDwNHMKG2y4/p6r1FgefH vidar@vidarholen.spam

This is a very simple file format, but I don’t know of any tools that will decode it. Simply base64-decode the middle string, and then read 4 bytes of length, followed by that many bytes of data. Repeat three times. You will then have key type, e and n, respectively.

Mine is 00 00 00 07, followed by 7 bytes “ssh-rsa”. Then 00 00 00 01, followed by one byte of 0x23 (35, our e). Finally, 00 00 00 61 followed by 0x61 = 97 bytes of our modulus n.

If you want to decode the private key by hand, base64-decode the middle bit. This gives you an ASN.1 encoded sequence of integers.

This is an annotated hex dump of parts of a base64-decoded private key

30 82 01 ca   - Sequence, 0x01CA bytes
    02 01: Integer, 1 byte
        00
    02 61:    - Integer, 0x61 bytes (n).
        00 d8 f7 ae 5d c5 87 39 8e 96 ... Same as from openssl!
    02 01:  - Integer, 1 byte, 0x23=35 (e)
        23
    02 61  - Integer, 0x61 bytes (d)
        00 a7 5f fb 8a 2a aa 25 16 39 ...
    ...

Here’s a bash script that will decode a private key and output variable definitions and functions for bc, so that you can play around with it without having to do the copy-paste work yourself. It decodes ASN.1, and only requires OpenSSL if the key has a passphrase.

When run, and its output pasted into bc, you will have the variables n, e, d, p, q and a few more, functions encrypt(m) and decrypt(c), plus a verify() that will return 1 if the key is valid. These functions are very simple and transparent.

Enjoy!

MP3 to Video using GStreamer visualizations

Everyone loves music visualization, but not all apps support it in a sensible way. Maybe you want to shuffle a random assortment of video and audio files in a player that doesn’t handle that well (VLC!), or not at all (mplayer!). Or maybe you want to upload something to youtube, with gorgeous HD visualizations instead of that lame static cover art image?

The few google results on the topic that weren’t spam suggested screencapping software. Yeah, that’s great… until you have more than two files.

Once again, everyone’s favourite multimedia swiss army knife – GStreamer – steps up to the plate.

Here’s an example of encoding an MP3 to an H.264 .mkv file using the gorgeous goom visualizer (requires the mp3 and x264 plugins for gstreamer):

gst-launch filesrc location=input.mp3 ! queue ! tee name=stream ! queue ! mp3parse ! matroskamux name=mux ! filesink location="output.mkv" stream. ! queue ! mp3parse ! mad ! audioconvert ! queue ! goom ! ffmpegcolorspace ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=1280,height=720 ! x264enc ! mux.

It’s beautiful – and the video is pretty sweet as well.

It’s worth noting that this approach does not re-encode the MP3, like some less awesome approaches would do (causing loss of quality). It simply muxes it together with the visualizer’s video stream. x264 even seems to distribute itself well across cores.

No, wait, what? MP3 and H.264? Of course, I meant Vorbis and Theora! Let me rephrase:

gst-launch filesrc location=input.ogg ! queue ! tee name=stream ! queue ! oggdemux ! vorbisparse ! oggmux name=mux ! filesink location="output.ogg" stream. ! queue ! oggdemux ! vorbisdec ! audioconvert ! queue ! goom ! ffmpegcolorspace ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=1920,height=1080 ! theoraenc ! mux.

The same goodness applies, except for the parallelism. If you have a multicore CPU, there’s massive speedup to be had through simple shell script based multithreading. (Why full HD this time? VLC on Windows crashes on 720p Theora!)

And there you have it. A simple, hack-free, modular and flexible way of encoding visualization videos for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files. Thanks, GStreamer!

Is it terminal?

Applications often behave differently in subtle ways when stdout is not a terminal. Most of the time, this is done so smoothly that the user isn’t even aware of it.

When it works like magic

Consider ls:

vidar@vidarholen ~/src $ ls
PyYAML-3.09      bsd-games-2.17       nltk-2.0b9
alsa-lib-1.0.23  libsamplerate-0.1.7  pulseaudio-0.9.21
bash-4.0         linux                tmp
bitlbee-1.2.8    linux-2.6.32.8
vidar@vidarholen ~/src $

Now, say we want a list of projects in our ~/src dir, ignoring version numbers:

# For novelty purposes only; parsing ls is a bad idea
vidar@vidarholen ~/src $ ls | sed -n 's/-[^-]*$//p'
PyYAML
alsa-lib
bash
bitlbee
bsd-games
libsamplerate
linux
nltk
pulseaudio
vidar@vidarholen ~/src $

Piece of cake, right?

But think about the magic that actually happened there: We started out with three lines of coloured text, ran it through sed to search&replace on each line, and ended up with nine lines of uncoloured text.

How did sed filter the colours? How did it put each filename a separate line, when the same does not happen for echo "foo bar" | sed ..?

The answer, of course, is that it didn’t. ls detected that output wasn’t a terminal and altered its output accordingly.

When outputting to a terminal, you can be fairly sure that the user will be reading it directly, so you can make it as pretty and unparsable as you want. When output is not a terminal, it’s likely going to some program or file where pretty output will just complicate things.

Life without magic

Try the previous example with ls -C --color=always instead of just ls, and see how different life would have been without this terminal detection. You can also try this with xargs, to see how colours could break things:

vidar@vidarholen ~/src $ ls -C --color=always | xargs ls -ld
ls: cannot access PyYAML-3.09: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access alsa-lib-1.0.23: No such file or directory
...

The directories obviously exist, but the ANSI escape codes that give them that cute colour also prevents utilities from working with them. For additional fun, copy-pasting this error message from a terminal strips the colours, so anyone you reported it to would be quite stumped.

Magic efficiency tricks

It’s not all about making output pretty or parsable depending on the situation. Read/write syscalls are notoriously expensive; reading anything less than about 4k bytes at a time will make disk reads CPU bound.

glibc knows this, and will alter write buffering depending on the context. If the output is a terminal, a user is probably watching and waiting for it, so it will flush output immediately. If it’s a file, it’s better to buffer it up for efficiency:

vidar@kelvin ~ $ strace -e write -o log grep God text/bible12.txt 01:001:001 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ... vidar@kelvin ~ $ wc -l log 3948 log

In other words, grep wrote about god 3948 times (insert your own bible forum jokes).

vidar@kelvin ~ $ strace -e write -o log grep God text/bible12.txt > tmp vidar@kelvin ~ $ wc -l log 64 log

This time, grep produced the exact same output, but wrote to a file instead. This resulted in 64 writes – about 1% of the more interactive mode!

Spells of confusion

Sometimes magic can confuse and astound. What if output is kinda like a terminal, only not?

ls -l gives the user pretty colours. ls -l | more does not. The reason is not at all obvious for users who just consider ” | more” a way to scroll in output. But it works, even if it’s not as pretty as we’d like.

Here’s a much more confusing example (just go along with the simplified grep):

# Show apache traffic (works)
cat access.log

# Show 404 errors with line numbers (works)
cat access.log | grep 404 | nl

Basic stuff.

# Show apache traffic in realtime (works)
tail -f access.log

# Show 404 errors with line numbers in realtime (FAILS)
tail -f access.log | grep 404 | nl

While the logic is the same as before, our realtime error log doesn’t show anything!

Why? Because grep’s output isn’t a terminal, so it will buffer up about 4k worth of data before writing it all in one go. In the mean time, the command will just seem to hang for no apparent reason!

(Observant readers might ask, “Isn’t tail buffering?”. And it might be or it might not. It depends on your version and distro patches.)

Mastering magic

Ok, so what can we do to take charge of these useful peculiarities?

Many apps have flags for this, though none of them are POSIX.

GNU ls lets you specify -C for columned mode, and --color=always for colours, regardless of the nature of stdout.

sed has -u, grep has a --line-buffered. awk has a fflush function. tail, if yours buffers at all, has a -u since about 2008 which as of now isn’t in debian stable.

If your app doesn’t have such an option, there’s always unbuffer from Expect, the interactive tool scripting package.

unbuffer starts applications within its own pseudo-tty, much like how xterm and sshd does it. This usually tricks the application into not buffering (and maybe to prettify its output).

Obviously, this depends on the app using standard C stdio, or that it checks for a terminal itself. Apps can unintentionally be written to avoid this, like when setting Java’s System.Out to a BufferedOutputStream.

And finally… how can you create such behaviour yourself?

if [[ -t 1 ]] #if stdout is a terminal
then
    tput setaf 3 #Set foreground to yellow
fi
echo "Pure gold"