Toolserver:Code snippets

Calculate replag
NB: This actually shows how long ago the last edit to the wiki was. If the wiki hasn't been edited for a while, it might appear the replag is higher than it really is, because the last edit was some time ago.

Select a server
See Queries for a description of the "sql" script.

Kill processes
To get the process ID (pid), see viewing processes. Once you have the pid, you can kill it: kill pid

If the process doesn't exit, kill it harder: kill -9 pid

But be aware that kill -9 doesn't give the process any opportunity to clean up.

If the process is running in the foreground (i.e. from the shell), you can also kill it with CTRL-C. If that doesn't work, try CTRL-\ (which like kill -9, gives the process no opportunity to clean up).

To kill all your processes at once, including any and all ssh processes: pkill -u username

Bash
These scripts and settings should be placed in your .bash_profile file. After updating the file, you need to source it in order for the changes to become active ($ source ~/.bash_profile).

Setting a default editor
The default editor on nightshade is currently nano. If you want to change your personal default editor (for example, to use joe</tt>), use: export EDITOR=joe

MySQL queries
If you primarily deal with running queries on one particular database, there are bash scripts that can make life easier. The "sql" script is great for selecting the appropriate server, however it requires a lot of typing for commonly needed functions. And when a query finishes, you don't know how many results were output.

The "query" script runs an .sql file on the particular database and then prints the number of lines returned from the query.

The "gquery" scripts run an .sql file on the particular database, prints the number of lines returned from the query, and then gzips the output.

Both scripts are invoked using the script name followed by the file name (without an extension), for example: $ query articles-ns-0

Symlinks
If you are constantly needing to make files public from a particular directory, it's possible to create a "mkpub" shortcut to symlink the files to your public directory (public_html/).

IPv4
Copped from http://www.geekzilla.co.uk/View0CBFD9A7-621D-4B0C-9554-91FD48AADC77.htm

'Unit' testing
If you need to check various pieces of data against multiple tests and see what data passes each test a quick and dirty way to do that is like so

Dealing with UTF-8
One problem you might run into, especially when dealing with non-english wikis, is that page titles can contain utf8. Perl uses an internal flag to denote whether or not a string is utf8 or not. Concatenating or processing strings with mixed flags can often lead to strange side effects such as double encoding or getting mangled. Doing the following can help avoid most, if not all, problems: