Monthly Archives: January 2015

Showing a running clock in a linux shell

I was working with a scheduler and wanted to keep track of my server time. Continuous invocation of date command wouldn’t cut it. So a little search on net lead me to this link which basically sums up the following script. This script will show the current time on the top left corner of your terminal which is good enough for my usecase.


while sleep 1;do tput sc;tput cup 0 $(($(tput cols)-11));echo -e "\e[31m`date +%r`\e[39m";tput rc;done &

I executed this code on a Cent OS system and it worked fine. I have tested this snippet in Debian as well and it worked like a charm. This won’t solve everybody’s problem but for specific situation where you just want to watch the clock of your server from a shell this is a good enough script.

Synergy for Multi-Computer Control

I have to work with Windows, Linux and Macbook environment and with time I have no issues working with all of these environments simultaneously. What used to irk me the most was the need to physically use multiple keyboards and mouse and control my Windows laptop and Macbook. Doing VNC / Remote Desktop into another computer didn’t cut it. So I found out about Synergy project long time ago. This is a free and open source keyboard/mouse sharing solution.

Basically the computer whose keyboard/mouse you want to use becomes the Synergy server and all other laptops / computer would become Synergy client. It is very easy to setup and once it is done I can use the keyboard / mouse of of my Macbook to control my windows laptop as well as Linux laptop simultaneously.

Detecting Java Processes listening on local ports

We can use the jps command that is part of JDK to find out which Java processes are running in the current user’s session. We can further find out which network ports have been opened by a particular java process.

Use the follwing command to list all java processes:
jps -l

If you want more details about a process you can execute the following command:
jps -v | findstr <process id>

The following variant of netstat command lists all the listening as well as established socket connection in a system:
netstat -ano

This command can be further used to find out what sockets are opened by a specific process
netstat -ano | findstr <process id>