Monitoring stuff through Dropbox

TLDR: write command output to a text file in your Dropbox folder, and look at it from any device.

If you’ve got the Dropbox Linux daemon running, it’s super-easy to monitor stuff on a Linux machine from any phone or tablet. The “traditional” way to do this would be to use an email (sendmail), but this is far more lightweight, realtime and flexible if you already happen to have Dropbox set up.

[srazzaque@srv ~]$ for num in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
> do
> echo $num > ~/Dropbox/a_file.txt
> sleep 5
> done

Perhaps more common would be:

[srazzaque@srv ~]$ long-running-cmd > ~/Dropbox/cmd-output.txt

And that’s basically it - you can view the files on any device that supports Dropbox. You could use it for basically any command that has text output (which is, basically most Linux commands you’d run in a terminal) - so monitoring processes, uptime, anything.