Linux Training_Module 8 – Assignment

Module 8 - Assignment

Problem Statement: You work for xyz organization. Your job work is to manage Linux-based servers.

You have been asked to:

1. Launch Firefox 3 times, find their PID and use the kill command to close them
2. Monitor incoming logs files to a folder using inotify and output them to a file

Task 1: §

Launched Firefox 3 times:

After launching Firefox, I used the pgrep command to observe the multiple processes that were spawned:

pgrep -f firefox

Now we terminate these processes by piping these PIDs to the kill -9 command using xargs and confirm with pgrep -f firefox

pgrep -f firefox | xargs -r kill -9
pgrep -f firefox #confirming termination

Task 2: §

First I need to install inotify utility

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install inotify-tools -y 

I’ll create a folder to monitor called log_folder in ~/Desktop

mkdir log_folder

In order to monitor this folder and output the monitoring to a separate file I’ll create script log_monitor.sh with the following code:

#!/bin/bash
 
# Directory to watch
WATCH_DIR="/home/hector/Desktop/log_folder"
 
# Output file
OUTPUT_FILE="/home/hector/Desktop/inotifywait_log"
 
# Remove the output file if it already exists
if [ -e "$OUTPUT_FILE" ]; then
  rm "$OUTPUT_FILE"
fi
 
# Create the output file
touch "$OUTPUT_FILE"
 
# Start the monitoring
inotifywait -m -e close_write --format '%w%f' "$WATCH_DIR" | while read -r NEW_FILE; do
  echo "New file detected: $NEW_FILE"
  echo "Appending contents to $OUTPUT_FILE"
  echo "$NEW_FILE" >> "$OUTPUT_FILE"
done

The script uses inotifywait with -e close_write which is triggered when a file is created or written to. Furthermore, the script’s output will be recorded in file inotifywait_log in ~/Desktop

Need to make the script log_monitor.sh executable

chmod +x log_monitor.sh

I’ll execute the script to start monitoring

./log_monitoring.sh

To test the monitoring I’ll start creating files inside log_folder

We now see our running script has some console output

Now we check the output file generate by the script inotifywait_log an see the files created