If you’re a user of AFS with Kerberos, you’ve no doubt been annoyed at your ticket expiring and having to run aklog to get a new one. You may have tried to script running aklog automatically periodically, but been stymied that aklog won’t refresh an about-to-expire ticket. So, you have to scrape the output of klist for the expiration time and wait until then — easy enough. So simple that my script to do so, nicely indented and with declared integer variables for now and then weighed in at a paltry 353 bytes.

So, I figured if I inlined everything, I could fit it in a twitter post. And lo, it does:

while sleep $((`date -d "$(klist -5 | tail -1 | awk '{ print $3 " " $4 }')" +%s` - `date +%s`)); do aklog; done

That’s 112 characters, including unnecessary spaces for readability and the trailing newline, leaving plenty of room for extras you might think up.

Now, if only I could fit all this commentary in a twitter post…