Best Practices - Xensoft

CLI

Best Way to Copy Dotfiles

I've seen a lot of convoluted solutions floating around regarding how to copy files starting with .. The problem everyone is trying to avoid is that when you run something like: cp -r A/.* B/ The above command starts copying everything the entire "A" directory (.) and then from the parent directory

E-Mail

Make sSMTP Non-Blocking for PHP

If you're trying to send e-mail from PHP (in Drupal or not) using sSMTP you'll find any page sending an e-mail out stalling for several seconds while sSMTP logs in and sends the e-mail out. It's a serious performance hit and can make using your website rather annoying. If you're

CLI

Become an SSH Ninja: SSH Tips and Tricks

[http://instacod.es/90274] OpenSSH [http://www.openssh.com/] has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve beyond it's "Clark Kent"-esque ability to provide a secure command line interface on a remote system. Here are some of its more "Superman"-type abilities: * Public-Key Authentication * Learn to Love Your .ssh/

CLI

Use Redirection Instead of Temp Files

There are certain commands that really want to read input in from a file, like diff. However, if what you're trying to manipulate or use with one of these commands is actually output from another command usually you'd have to write this information out to a file before reading it

Apache

Redirect Web Traffic to Another Sub-domain (e.g. www) or HTTP to HTTPS

Using the mod_rewrite module you can configure Apache to redirect web traffic from one sub-domain to another. Usually used to redirect a bare domain ( http://xensoft.com) to the www sub-domain (http://www.xensoft.com). First make sure you're loading the mod_rewrite module in your httpd.conf or

Best Practices

Boot on Power Restore with a Mac Mini When Using Linux

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007477COO/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B007477COO&linkCode=as2&tag=xen02-20] By John Westlund 04 Apr 2014

CLI

Adding a Little Color to Recursive diffs

I have routine need to recursively diff two large directory trees with small changes sprinkled throughout. After staring at pages and pages of one diffed file after another it becomes easy to lose track of what two files' differences I'm looking at. An easy way to keep track of things

Regex

On-line Regex Checker and Visualizer

This is a pretty cool tool [http://regex101.com]. Type in a Regular Expression and the text you're trying to match against and it'll show you what matches as well as explain the the expression.

RPM

Use yum to Only Install Security Relevant Fixes

If you use yum to manage your server's packages and you're trying to keep things stable then only installing security relevant fixes makes a lot of sense. The yum-plugin-security package adds a plugin that makes keeping track of these things a snap: yum -y install yum-plugin-security Then you can list

Best Practices

Expand Shortened URLs

Here's a requested article. Have you ever run into a shortened URL and have no idea where on the World Wide Web it will take you? There are URL expansion services that will untangle the web of possible redirects and show you ultimately where the shortened URL will take you:

CLI

Re-call Command Line Arguments in BASH

BASH's history expansion character, ! has many features, including !: for choosing a specific argument (or range of arguments) from the history. The gist is any number after !: is the number of the argument you want, with !:1 being the first argument and !:0 being the command. echo one two three one

CLI

A Couple Ways to Return a Random Number on the Command Line

Lets explore a couple ways to get random numbers on the command line. > Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin. John von Neumann $RANDOM Bash Internal $RANDOM is an internal Bash function (not a constant) that returns a