Script to automate building an adblocking hosts file

[GreyGeek]

Ya, I'll get over it. Just a small case of brain envy!

(I hadn't noticed that "two hour" thing last November...)

[SteveRiley]

(I hadn't noticed that "two hour" thing last November...)

Ah... I thought maybe you had meant to reply to some other thread here on the board!

[oshunluvr]

Have you updated this one lately?

GG's intergalactic hitchhiking not withstanding of course...

...don't forget your towel Jerry!

[SteveRiley]

Nope. I plan to add the extra functionality discussed here: KDialog and an easy-on-off mechanism at least. A relatively simple tailoring mechanism like what you described earlier shouldn't be too difficult, either.

Alas, it's easy to get distracted! I have some air travel coming up, and Alaska Air has wi-fi on all planes now, so perhaps I can put those five hours on SEA-DCA to good use, eh?

[Snowhog]

Just created SR's script and ran it and replaced my /etc/hosts file accordingly. Rebooted. Browsing does indeed seem more responsive - snappier. Cool.

Note: I at least, could not execute the script by just typing gethosts. Kept getting "gethosts: command not found". Executing it with

./gethosts

works.

[SecretCode]

What directory did you save the script in? Home, I'm guessing, and also guessing that's not in your PATH.

If you put it in ~/bin it will get found. (After you start a new shell - one of the bash initialisation scripts add ~/bin to your path if it exists.)

[SteveRiley]

Right... unlike Windows, which always checks the current subdirectory before following %PATH%, Linux only follows $PATH. So

./gethosts

would work if your current working directory is the one containing the script. Alternately, if your script is in your home directory,

~/gethosts

will execute the script regardless of what your current working directory is.

[SecretCode]

Windows, which always checks the current subdirectory before following %PATH%

Wait, that would be so convenient. Why doesn't Linux do that?

Oh, I remember. Security!

[Snowhog]

Save the text above into a file called ~/gethosts.

I followed Steve's instructions exactly as stated to above -- which saves the file in the users home directory.

[SecretCode]

Oh indeed. I'm not suggesting you did something wrong. I'm suggesting a slight improvement to Steve's instructions. ...

[SteveRiley]

Oh indeed. I'm not suggesting you did something wrong. I'm suggesting a slight improvement to Steve's instructions. ...

Alrighty... added an instruction to remind folks how to run it with ~/gethosts. And added the bit about ~/bin. (I didn't know this!)

[SecretCode]

[oshunluvr]

Cut and paste doesn't work 'cause the forum is truncating the fourth source link.

[SteveRiley]

Fixed that...somehow, URL BBCODES snuck into there.

[Guest]

The script outputs the file ~/hosts-block. Each time you run it, you'll need to manually replace your existing host file with this command:
Code:

sudo cp ~/hosts-block /etc/hosts

Instead of manually doing this, why not just have it in the script? It seems to do fine for me. Also, I was thinking of using KDE's Autostart instead of a weekly cron job, but it seems there are issues with it because there are no options to run weekly, as Windows does, unless someone knows of another option?