Bashscripts.org

I need a script to disable a list of sites at 7am, then enable them at 7pm.
Facebook and MySpace for a good start... since I would be much more productive.

I know I can change the hosts file like so to stop Facebook for example:
127.0.0.1 facebook.com #now it points to my personal server 0.0.0.0 might work too ?

but to have it do this automatically would be great. Only during the week would be a bonus.

It has to be pretty easy but I don't know how to set it up. thank you very much in advance.

Hi poetfreak!

The script itself should be easy enough. I'd probably just use something like 'echo' to append those lines to the end of the hosts file, and 'sed' to delete them. What do you have so far? Do you know how to format the crontab? You can edit it with 'crontab -e'

I hope this helps!
-J

Another drive by post that I can gain valuable experience I guess.

So in writing this script I noticed that when I remove the lines with sed it leaves blank lines where the text is removed.

An example after running the script and sites are removed I still see the blank lines left from where the sites were removed.



After sed removes these lines and vim displays the file as follows:



I tried various sed commands in my script such as

sed -i /^$/d' $HOSTS

and

sed -i / *$/d' $HOSTS

this is really bothering me

Here is the script



My sites file looks like this



Correct me if I am wrong, this is only from guessing in my head, but when creating a new crontab entry it should look like this: