In the spirit of open source, I've decided to share a little project that I've been working on with everyone. I was wanting some sort of software that would report on who had mp3's, wma's, movies and such on the network share and send me an email report. Everything that I found didn't work well or was too expensive. So here's what I did: I created a cron job that looked like this:


"locate *.mp3>/Sharedfolder/Reports/Music/report.txt | locate *.wma > /Sharedfolder/Reports/Music/report.txt"

These lines create a small text file with a line by line report of all mp3's and wma's on the drive. This cron job is ran locally on the file server. Then on my machine (Windows unfortunately) I run this batch file every night in the Scheduled Tasks:

"start /w sendemail.exe -u N:\Reports\Music\report.txt -f yourfromemailaddress@domainname.com -s serveripaddress:serverportaddress -t yourdestinationemailaddress@domainname.com -u Unauthorized Music Files -m Unauthrorized Music Report -a N:\Reports\Music\report.txt"

The sendemail.exe program is a command line email program that can be found here:

http://caspian.dotconf.net/menu/Soft...Email-v152.zip


That's pretty much it. Every night, the report gets created and every night the sendemail program sends it to me via attachment. Because I am running Thunderbird configured a certain way, (I don't know off the top of my head), the attachment is automatically previewed for me. Anyways, this is a nice, simple solution for those of you out there needing a reporting software idea. If you have anything to add, please feel free to do so. I'm always open to new ideas and ways around a problem. Now the only issue I've ran into is I can't seem to do more then 2 items at a time (mp3's and wma's for example) I'd like for it to report mp3's, wma's, m4a's, etc. but that seems to get all screwy when I try for more then 2 items at a time. Anyways, enjoy!

Travis

While I appreciate your contribution, I'd like to offer a suggestion for an improvement. First off, locate depends on the database being up to date. I'd use find. For example:

Oh, I had forgotten to mention that I do an updatedb everynight at midnight. But I like your idea better. It seems to fix my multiple file extensions problem. Thanks for the tip!

Travis

No problem. Most systems do perform updatedb regularly, and your technique would be faster in that case. If you do want to use locate, you could always do something like:

It never occured to me that I could do multiple commands by using a simple ; between them. I was always under the impression that I had to pipe the info from one command to another with | But then again I'm from the olden days and I'm so used to Microsoft, that I am finding that Linux has all these neat little features. I've been using Linux off and on again for the past 5 years, but have seriously gotten into it for the last year or so. Our company is relatively small, so Linux has made a big impact on our servers in terms of uptime, stability, and performance. Plus, I can do all of our maintenance late at night without bothering people, so locate seemed to be the best idea at the time, but I have tried your idea out and it works way better. Thanks again for all the helpful tips!

Travis

No problem. It's what we're here for.