Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Why fast?

Our self-denial is sterile and absurd if we practice it for the wrong reasons or, worse still, without any valid reason at all.
Merton, No Man Is an Island 6.7 (p. 101)
So what's a reason that's not wrong? What's a valid reason for fasting?

For a while I had a habit of fasting on Sundays: I'd skip lunch. But why did I do it? Well, I didn't have a valid reason, and I stopped after a while.

So what is a valid reason? Merton helps us again here:

… The perfection of Christian renunciation is the total offering of ourselves to God in union with the sacrifice of Christ.

To offer this sacrifice perfectly we must practice asceticism, without which we cannot gain enough control over our hearts and their passions to reach such a degree of indifference to life and death.

Merton, op. cit., p. 102
So that's the point: to gain control over our hearts and their passions, so that we can become indifferent to food or whatever we're attracted (or addicted) to, so that we can get closer to the ideal: to offer our whole selves to God, to be indifferent to everything except the will of God.

And that's a valid reason: to be free of our own appetites and passions, not just regarding food, but anything that one might be (or become) addicted to. As Paul writes to married couples in 1 Corinthians 7.5, which I had not understood before: Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer.

The point, of course, isn't that husbands and wives spend so much time in bed that they have no time to pray; rather, it's that by abstaining voluntarily for a (brief) time they can surrender more of themselves to God.

For a brief time, that is.

Let's see if I can free up 11GB (or: finding and taking care of duplicate files on a mac mini)

The lovely Carol has a mac mini, which currently serves[sic] as an NFS server for my desktop. It also backs up our laptops. This machine, which is backed up off-site, has a huge hard drive that I thought would keep us in disk space for a long long time.

You can guess what happened: photos and music—especially photos—tend to expand to fill the space available. It doesn't help that we have multiple copies of stuff. So I thought to run some Perl or Python script to help me find said copies.

Since I've become a Python partisan I went that route. A web search turned up some helpful hints on stackoverflow and particularly this post on endlesslycurious.com. The mac mini has python2.6, so I made a few modifications; you can see the whole thing at http://cpwriter.net/dup2/.

I ran that on /Users on the lovely Carol's mac mini, putting the results into dups.out.

mini1:~ collin$ wc -l dups.out
   12489 dups.out
mini1:~ collin$ 
Yep, that's a lot of files. A couple of big offenders:
mini1:~ collin$ grep Best.*Wedding dups.out
[621850501, ['/Users/carol/from-macbook/Movies/Best of Wedding.mov', \
   '/Users/collin/from-pbook/Desktop/Best of Wedding.mov']]
[989954048, ['/Users/carol/from-macbook/Desktop/Redeemer Marriage Series/Best of Wedding-DVD.img', \
   '/Users/collin/from-pbook/Desktop/Best of Wedding-DVD.img']]
mini1:~ collin$ 
That's 621Mbytes and 989Mbytes. So about 1.5GB freed up just like that. But I think we have a lot more. I discovered a lot of files under "archives" and "from-pbook" that are the same, like this:
mini1:~ collin$ grep archives dups.out|grep -m5 from-pbook
[1049177, ['/Users/collin/archives/collin-laptop/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2009/01/01/IMG_3001.JPG', \
   '/Users/collin/archives/data1/pix-dec08/img_3001.jpg', \
   '/Users/collin/from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2009/01/01/IMG_3001.JPG', 
   '/Users/collin/pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/img_3001.jpg']]
…
Wow, four paths to the same file. Hey, can I get rid of all those pix-dec08 paths? Yes, because:
  1. A "diff -r archives/data1/pix-dec08 pix/2008/12/pix-dec08" showed that these two directories are identical;
  2. every "large" (not a thumbnail or slide) image file under pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/ appeared in dups.out. Except those under 1024×1024 bytes:
    mini1:~ collin$ for F in pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/*jpg; do if grep -qF $F dups.out; then : OK; else ls -l $F; fi; done       
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 collin  _lpoperator  1002328 Dec 31  2008 pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/img_2961.jpg
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 collin  _lpoperator  858104 Jan  1  2009 pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/img_2988.jpg
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 collin  _lpoperator  863361 Jan  1  2009 pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/img_2994.jpg
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 collin  _lpoperator  865777 Jan  1  2009 pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/img_2995.jpg
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 collin  _lpoperator  994298 Jan  1  2009 pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/img_2996.jpg
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 collin  _lpoperator  811491 Jan  1  2009 pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/img_2997.jpg
    mini1:~ collin$
I'm going to take the leap of faith that the remaining files are in fact there in the other paths... well, no I won't:
mini1:~ collin$ for F in pix/2008/12/pix-dec08/*jpg; do if grep -qF $F dups.out; then : OK; else \
     Y=`basename $F|tr [:lower:] [:upper:]`; \
     Z=`/bin/ls from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/200*/*/*/$Y`; \
     echo $Z;cmp "$F" "$Z"; echo; fi; done                                                          
from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2008/12/31/IMG_2961.JPG

from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2009/01/01/IMG_2988.JPG

from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2009/01/01/IMG_2994.JPG

from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2009/01/01/IMG_2995.JPG

from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2009/01/01/IMG_2996.JPG

from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2009/01/01/IMG_2997.JPG

mini1:~ collin$ 
So we can kill off those two paths. That might have saved another Gbyte or so.

Now, can we maybe hardlink the /Users/collin/archives/collin-laptop/Pictures/ stuff to/from the /Users/collin/from-pbook/Pictures/ stuff? And how much space might that save?

mini1:~ collin$ du -sh archives/collin-laptop/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/ from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/                                    
 12G archives/collin-laptop/Pictures/iPhoto Library/
 11G from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto Library/
mini1:~ collin$ 
Quite a bit. That plus the 1.5GB already saved earlier would be a significant help here:
collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> df -h .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
mini1:/Users          298G  257G   42G  87% /mnt/home
collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> ssh mini1 df -h .
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2  298Gi  256Gi   41Gi    87%    /
collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> 
Not sure why the difference, but there it is. Anyway, I wanted to hardlink one set of files to the other. (Why? Because the from-pbook directory may get rsync'd. If I delete the from-pbook directory, then it may come back later. And if I delete the other directory, and subsequently decide to remove the files from the pbook, then we'll lose the photos. So hardlink is the way to go.) Consequently I wrote this silly script:
collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> cat tmp/photos.sh 
#!/bin/sh
D2="archives/collin-laptop/Pictures/iPhoto Library"
D1="from-pbook/Pictures/iPhoto Library"

find "$D1" -type f | while read AFILE; do
    SUB=${AFILE#$D1/}
    #echo SUB=$SUB
    BFILE=$D2/$SUB 
    if [[ -s $BFILE ]] && [[ ! "$AFILE" -ef "$BFILE" ]] && cmp -s "$AFILE" "$BFILE"; then 
        if [[ $AFILE -ot $BFILE ]] ; then
     echo ln -f "'$AFILE'" "'$BFILE'"
 else
     echo ln -f "'$BFILE'" "'$AFILE'"
 fi
    fi
done
collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> time tmp/photos.sh > foo.out

real 41m18.878s
user 0m11.009s
sys 0m33.146s
collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> 
then ran it as you see above. A quick sanity check of "foo.out" looked reasonable. Ah, I probably should have run it on mini1, rather than on the NFS client. And the same here:
collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> df -h .; ./foo.out; df -h .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
mini1:/Users          298G  257G   42G  87% /mnt/home
-bash: ./foo.out: Permission denied   # D'oh! I didn't say "chmod +x"; well, let me fix it the easy way...
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
mini1:/Users          298G  257G   42G  87% /mnt/home
collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> df -h .; sh ./foo.out; df -h .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
mini1:/Users          298G  257G   42G  87% /mnt/home
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
mini1:/Users          298G  246G   53G  83% /mnt/home
collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> 
OK, that's enough for now.