Posts Tagged ‘php’

Emulate sendmail on your Dev Machine

February 8, 2011 by marco · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Linux, Serverstuff, Tools 
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In order to prevent email delivery during development and log all email messages that would have been delivered, you can actually do a simple trick: Replace the file /usr/sbin/sendmail (on Ubuntu, use ‘locate sendmail’ to find it if it lies elsewhere) with this little shell-script, or rather make a _bak of the original and save [...]

Clean your PHP4 Legacies using sed

October 19, 2010 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Linux, Snippets, Tools 
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If you have to deal with very old PHP4 legacy code containing every syntax crime you may know from the early years, how would you handle it? Give it to your junior people to fix it manually? I like to have at least some handy helpers for the first rough corrections. I found sed to [...]

Backup MySql-Database using only FTP

January 18, 2010 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Problems, Snippets 
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We have just had the case of having ftp access to a site on a shared hosting LAMP webspace but needed also the database and mainly the database scheme to setup our own development-system for the app. This is actually very straight forward using the following snippet uploaded and executed on the webserver: <?php exec( ’mysqldump [...]

Quick PHP Hack to Tidy up Trashed HTML

September 21, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Snippets, Tools 
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I just hacked together the following quick and dirty PHP-script to use the tidy-extension from the command line. Maybe somebody else needs something like this somewhere. Check the comment for details: <?php // // (a) Save this as tidy.php // (b) Call it from commandline like this: $ php tidy.php trashed.html > tidy.html // to [...]

Install PEAR on OSX

September 9, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Snippets, Tools, Uncategorized 
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Here is how you install PEAR on Mac OSX: sudo mkdir /usr/local/temp; sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/local/temp; sudo mkdir /usr/local/share/pear; sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/local/share/pear; curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear | sudo php; Set /usr/local as path prefix and install. You should then be able to use pear, e.g.: pear help. In order to install modules you also [...]

Upgrade PHP5 with an alternative sources.list on Debian etch

February 20, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Linux, Problems, Serverstuff 
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I was having trouble with a server running Debian 4.0 (etch). Using the standard sources in the /etc/apt/sources.list the supported PHP5 version was 5.2.0-8+etch13 which contained a very annoying bug for my application. A daily running script – let’s call it the Importer – regularly exited randomly with a “Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated [...]

Use of MySql Variables

January 14, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Snippets, mySQL 
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Case: I was building a CLI script to aggregate data from one MySql database and write results to another MySql database using 2 open db-connections. This way the script’s execution time was in the some-minutes-range… not good! I tried a more effective attempt: I let the CLI script output all necessary statements to drop and [...]

Log Debug into PHP Error Log

December 12, 2008 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Snippets 
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I needed to see some debug output on a production system and used the following hack: error_log(“\n@@@\n” . var_export($this->config, true) . “\n”); To see the output, I set a tail on the error-log-file: tail -f ~/sites/logs/php_error.log

Import .dbf File Contents into MySql

October 23, 2008 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Snippets, Tools 
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I had a bunch of .dbf (source was Lotus Approach) files, at which I wanted to shoot SQL-like queries to generate some meaningful reports. So there were 2 tasks to be accomplished: Read the data into a tool or database and formulate and perform the queries to generate results to base your reports on. As [...]