I recently started tinkering around with capistrano to automate a few things like doing checks and generally make my life easier in terms of managing a bunch of linux machines. While capistrano is really cool, it’s output is all over the place and I find that very irritating. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t like non-aligned repeating Strings. Take this output for example:

 \*\* \[out :: borked.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  14395) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: carmine.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  14433) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: mandelbrot.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  2835) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: magi.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  28830) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: enchilada.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  4455) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: titan.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  30098) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: kronos.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  27332) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: serenity.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  11072) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: ackbar.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  17522) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: r2d2.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  15535) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: seraph.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  24193) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: box.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  23061) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: fermi.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  8380) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: gossamer.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  28875) is running...
 \*\* \[out :: marvin.swisstech.net\] puppetd (pid  17977) is running...

The above is one of the easier to read examples. There are many more that are much worse to read than that (but too big to paste into the blog here).

… not for everyone maybe, but for me as a linux/java/groovy person it is!

you’ll need

• java
• groovy
• rsync
• ssh
• cron

I want to regularly copy files from a bunch of paths from several remote hosts to the localhost. I know nothing about arrays etc in bash to configure this stuff in a simple way but the solution I’ve come up with is simple and elegant: 

I wrote a little groovy script that generates the shell commands to be executed. the output of the groovy script is piped into bash, which executes the commands. That call of the groovy script with the piping to the bash is in a little shell script which is called from cron.