Using ssh to execute remote commands

I wanted to make a "make run" command to download and run my embedded application on target using ssh. Download with scp is no problem, but then I wanted to execute the program with a command like this.

ssh root@target_ip /tmp/myprogram & 

I experienced that the session would hang. It needed a to terminal the connection. I found that it seems to be the output from the program which makes it hang, so I tried piping the output to /dev/null. Something like this:

ssh root@target_ip /tmp/myprogram 2>/dev/null >/dev/null &

And this did the trick. Make now exits fine.

Using Firefox address bar for translations

Using the Firefox address bar for translating your word can easily made with the help of Google translate. Se below how to set-up this for Danish to English translation.

Handling path with white-spaces in a makefile

Handling path with white-spaces in a makefile is a bit awkward. Here is an example of how to get the path to the makefile it self, independent of the path containing white-spaces or not.


#######################################
# Find the project root directory
#######################################
PWD                       := $(shell pwd)
nullstring :=               # creating a null string
space := $(nullstring) # end of the line

MAKEFILE_DIR := $(subst $(space),\ ,$(PWD))

test -s

The test -s command behaves a bit different on Cygwin and Linux. In Linux it can be OK to use test -s to test for a directory, because it size if different from 0. But in Cygwin the test fails because directories in Cygwin have the size 0.

Understanding the Linux load average

I was examine /proc/loadavg today, but how to interpret it? I found this fine post describing the content:
http://juliano.info/en/Blog:Memory_Leak/Understanding_the_Linux_load_average

SSH login without password

Fine describe on how to make SSH login without password is found in this post.