Your Linux Boot Disk Full?

by | Jan 14, 2009 | Linux

While trying to run a YUM update on a CentOS server today, I got an error message about my /boot partition being full. I ran a df -h and sure enough, there was only 100k left. (My standard install uses 100MB for the boot partition.)

Here’s what I did to fix it.

rpm -q kernel

That returns a list of installed kernel updates. In my case I had more than 25…

kernel-2.6.9-22.EL
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.8.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.10.plus.c4
…
kernel-2.6.9-67.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.4.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.7.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.15.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.20.EL

To remove some of the older ones, run:

yum remove kernel-2.6.9-42.0.10.plus.c4

or to get several at one time:

yum remove kernel-2.6.9-42.*

I recommend leaving a few of the older ones in case you need to revert one day.

Using Linux Tail to Trim Your Files

by | Oct 24, 2008 | Linux

This tip is for my friend Scarb. For years I’ve used the Linux command “tail -f” for watching logs… but only recently did I discover its versatility for extracting parts of files.

Need to grab only the last 25 lines of a file?

tail -n 25 somefile.txt

How about the last 200000 bytes redirected to another file?

tail -c 200000 somefile.txt > newfile.txt

Handbrake batch conversion using CLI shell script

by | Aug 29, 2008 | Linux

I contributed to a Handbrake forum a while back. Thought you might find it useful too.

This is my evolving script for transcoding DVDs from MacTheRipper.

1) Save the file in a logical place (I keep it in the Movies Folder… same place I rip movies to). It will loop through all titles longer than X.

#!/bin/sh
# usage is ./thisScript.sh minimumDuration SomeDirContainingVIDEO_TS
# duration is set in minutes ("30" equals 30 minutes)
# specify the container directory for the VIDEO_TS directory
# example ./handbrake-longer-than.sh 30 24_SEASON6_D1
#set default path to HandBrakeCLI
PathToHandBrakeCLI=/some/path/to/HandBrakeCLI
if [ "${1}x" = "x" ]; then
echo "Minutes not provided"
exit
fi
if [ "${2}x" = "x" ]; then
echo "VIDEO_TS path not provided"
exit
fi
time=$1
export time
for i in $(find $2 -type d -name VIDEO_TS) ; do
for title in $($PathToHandBrakeCLI -t 0 -i $i -L 2>&1 | grep "has length" | sed 's/sec//' | sed 's/[()]//g' | awk '$8 > (60 * ENVIRON["time"]) { print $3 "-" $5 } ') ; do
#this names the title for the output file
titlenum=$(echo $title | cut -f 2 -d '-')
# you can change the preset or any other variables here
$PathToHandBrakeCLI -i $i -o ${2}-title${titlenum}-appletv.m4v --preset="AppleTV" -2 -T -P -t ${titlenum}
#output example: 24_SEASON6_D1-title1-appletv.m4v
done
 done

2) Within the script, set the path to your HandBrakeCLI app on line 9.

3) Don’t forget to run this before trying to execute it:
chmod 777 ./handbrake-longer-than.sh

4) Execute it like this:
./handbrake-longer-than.sh 30 24_SEASON6_D1

Where “30” is the shortest title you want to export and “24_SEASON6_D1” is the name of the folder containing your VIDEO_TS directory.