A web development/programming blog providing info, tips, and tricks on programming languages, scripting, Linux, MySQL and more
SSH/Command Line
How to reset the bash IFS variable
Jul 9th
Here’s a quick tip for everyone. I was working on a one-liner today at work that involved parsing through a file with some data in it. The data had spaces in it which can cause problems with the default $IFS variable (Internal File Separator). nixCraft has an excellent tutorial on working with the $IFS variable.
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What do three “less than” (<<<) symbols mean in PHP?
Jul 2nd
I am a true believer in that the best ways to learn how to do anything is by studying work of those who have done the same thing previously. When programming, that means looking at others’ code and learning from what they do. However, don’t assume that everything someone else does is correct! What this means is that not only should you learn what to do from other peoples’ code, but you should also learn what not to do.
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How to append values to an array in bash
Feb 4th
Last week I was working on a bash script for a project at work. The script parsed through a log file with server load and disk usage statistics at regular intervals. The script was calculating the average CPU idle time, disk utilization, and disk usage for servers. After calculating the averages for each of these three metrics, I then proceeded to loop through all the lines in the file and create an array of all the times when the CPU idle time was below average, or the disk utilization or usage was above average.
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How to Post to Twitter from a Linux Shell
Jun 18th
I had a little downtime today at work and decided to write a shell script that I could use to tweet from the shell of my Linux server. The reason is that Twitter is one of many social networking sites that is blocked at my workplace. However, I do have access to my server and found a great one-liner on commandlinefu.com to update twitter via curl. I decided to expand on this a bit and wrote a shell script that offers a bit more than merely posting a tweet. Check out my shell script to post to Twitter here.
How to Create a File of a Specific Size on Linux
Jun 16th
I was doing some testing the other night of a web-based file uploader I had built into one of the websites I had developed. The website is hosted on a GoDaddy.com shared hosting account
and allows my client to upload images, videos, and documents to her website directly through the browser. We had been running into a problem though with some files not uploading properly and I had a feeling it had to do with PHP limits imposed by the server. Even though I had raised the limits in a php.ini file, I thought those might be getting overwritten by the server.
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