Productivity: De-activate social networking on a schedule with cron

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Sometimes you need to block out distractions for a set amount of time. One of these is social networking, and it’s fairly early to temporarily break it (all for productivity of course!).

Mac or Linux users can break example.com like this: 

echo "127.0.0.1 example.com www.example.com" >> /etc/hosts

This tells the computer that it hosts example.com, so it wont load it from the internet.

And to compliment this, we have sed, which can delete lines from a file in-place based on a pattern:

sed -i '/example.com/d' /etc/hosts

Replace example.com above with your social network of choice, and have a shot. It will take a few minutes to have an effect, because of open connections and your computer’s DNS cache.

Scheduling it in

Cron is the go-to solution for scheduling any command on Unix. We’ll run this as root, as normal users don’t have permission to edit /etc/hosts:

su
crontab -e

If prompted, select nano as an editor.

If, for example, 6pm — 8pm weekdays is a distraction-free time for you, you would schedule the first command for 18:00 on days 1-5, and the second for 20:00 on days 1-5:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 18 * * 1-5 echo "127.0.0.1 example.com www.example.com" >> /etc/hosts
0 20 * * 1-5 sed -i '/example.com/d' /etc/hosts

If your use case calls for something more advanced, consider learning how to use squid to manage web traffic.

When you break something..

If you accidentally delete your /etc/hosts while experimenting, you can fetch its contents from /var/lib/dpkg/info/netbase.postinst (source).