I’ve always been a big fan of having a customized .bashrc file. The one I distribute to all of my servers has aliases for quick commands to save me time on the command line, functions that get work done when aliases are too simplistic, reporting for the server for each cli login, and of course a formatted and colored prompt (for terms that support colors). I also change certain aspects and commands based on the operating system since I’m not always on a redhat box or linux at all. Here’s my bashrc file – maybe you have some fun additions that you’d like to share. What saves you time on the command line?
Here’s a simple answer to a simple question. “How do I run a backup of MySQL to another machine without writing to the local server’s filesystem?” – this is especially useful if you are running out of space on the local server and cannot write a temporary file to the filesystem during backups.
Method one – this writes a remote file.
mysqldump [options] [db_name|--all-databases]| gzip -c | ssh user@host.com "cat > /path/to/new/file.sql.gz"
Method two – this writes directly into a remote mysql server
mysqldump [options] [db_name|--all-databases]| mysql --host=[remote host] –user=root –password=[pass] [db_name]
If you’re using the new Arthemia theme for WordPress you might notice that there are two areas of the theme that can have articles promoted to; namely Headline and Featured sections. This is controlled by category association. Basically you have a post and if you want it in the Headline area of the theme you attach the category “headline” to it, similarly for the featured section. Now, let’s say you don’t want to manually change this all the time since it can be time consuming to promote posts to those categories if you want rotating content.
Here’s a simple solution. In this bash script I connect to MySQL and remove the current associations from posts and then randomly choose posts to be promoted to the Headline and Featured categories. This can be modified for other ideas you might have involving categories/posts/randomized associations in WordPress.
The queries contain IDs for the Headline and Featured categories. In my installation, which will be different than yours, has the Headline category as ID=’103′ and Featured as ID=’104′ – replace as needed. I’m also doing some matching (see the WHERE sections) so that I don’t promote posts with certain IDs that are specific to the site for this script. You’ll want to customize the queries as needed for your site. You can find the script here: http://pastebin.com/1QqiM5rh
If you own a Nokia N900 cellular device you might be interested in the ability to control all of your IM accounts from the command line. For those that do not know, the N900 runs Maemo Linux and is capable of running MySQL embedded if you so choose. Here’s a quick script I wrote to provide that functionality for IM accounts. It’s at the bottom of the page, called “im-connections”.
wiki: http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_Mission_Control#Set_all_SIP_accounts_to_online_or_offline
pastebin: http://pastebin.com/qAC57E1N
For all of those linux users out there that have moved over to, or tried out, Solaris10 or OpenSolaris because they heard the tales of how MySQL is faster on Solaris… or perhaps you wanted to learn how to use Sol10 for the great features of Zones or the ZFS filesystem? Regardless of why you’re on it you are probably wondering why Linux has colored output of filenames and directories but Solaris does not. The question of ‘why?’ isn’t important, but how to enable colors is. It’s very simple, and here’s how I fixed it. This is a result of digging through multiple semi-related links on Google.
- Download all packages from SunFreeware.com
- dependency: libintl-3.4.0-sol10-x86-local
- dependency: libiconv-1.13.1-sol10-x86-local
- dependency: gmp-4.2.1-sol10-x86-local
- dependency: gcc-3.4.6-sol10-x86-local or libgcc-3.4.6-sol10-x86-local depending on your system needs
- coreutils-8.4-sol10-x86-local
- Install ‘coreutils’ dependency packages using the command “pkgadd -d [package_name]
- Install ‘coreutils’ packages using the command “pkgadd -d coreutils-8.4-sol10-x86-local
- Enable color aliases in your rc file: “alias ls=’/usr/local/bin/ls –color=auto’”
Current Books in Review
