convert dmesg timestamp to date time

If you have messages in dmesg that log the event time as “seconds since last boot”, it can be difficult to tell when they happened. Here’s an example of one of these messages:

# tail -1 /var/log/dmesg
[8969653.483175] poorcoding.php[14798]: segfault at 7f2efca36ed0 ip 00007f2efca36ed0 sp 00007f2efaf0be98 error 14
#

You could use something like this to parse out the timestamp and convert it to a date:

# date --date=@$((`date +%s --date="\`who -b | awk '{print $3" "$4}'\`"` + `dmesg | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}' | sed -e 's/\[//g' -e 's/\..*//g'`))
Thu Nov  5 01:21:53 PDT 2015
#

If your application logs to kern.log, it uses timestamps as well as seconds since uptime, so the error will already have a timestamp on it

Aug 14 09:57:59 myhostname kernel: [8969653.483177] poorcoding.php[14800]: segfault at 7f2efca36ec8 ip 00007f2efca36ec8 sp 00007f2ef10c4e98 error 14

TODO: make a quick function; convert all the messages not just a tailed or greped one;

use wget to recursively download files via FTP

A command line ftp client is good for many things. You can turn off prompting, and use mget with wildcard to get many files. The problem is that mget doesn’t create directories locally, so when it tries to recurse into destination directories in order to place incoming files into them, it fails. We can use wget instead to traverse the directory structure, create folders, and download

# wget -r 'ftp://username:password@ftp.example.com'

Note: rsync would be ideal for this, but there are some cases where the source only offers ftp as a connection protocol.