systemBash » Code Samples

Exporting Announcements from WHMCS

Dave — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:59:31 +0000

Doing some integration work with WHMCS, I found the need to export some of the announcements into WordPress. Since there isn’t any native implementation of this, I found the best way is to export it directly from the database. The PHP code to do this is fairly easy:

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include("/path/to/whmcs/configuration.php");
$link = mysql_connect($db_host,$db_username,$db_password);
mysql_select_db($db_name);
$query = "SELECT * FROM tblannouncements WHERE published='on' ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 0,3";
$result=mysql_query($query);
while($data = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$id = $data["id"];
$date = $data["date"];
$title = $data["title"];
$announcement = $data["announcement"];
echo("\"/support/announcements.php?id=$id\">$title");
}

If you wanted to make it more than 3 posts, just change the limit to 5 or 10 or whatever you wish. You can also change the ordering and add additional filters via more SQL statements. If you wanted to do a list, encapulate the code with

entries.

I’m using this code in a WordPress template but it would work equally as well in any other PHP based application.

What a Resilver Looks Like in ZFS (and a Bug and/or Feature)

Dave — Sun, 15 May 2011 12:16:08 +0000

At home I have an (admittedly small) ZFS array set up to experiment with this awesome newish RAID technology. I think it has been around long enough that it can now be used in production, but I’m still getting used to the little bugs/features, and here is one that I just found.

After figuring out that I had 2 out of 3 of my 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives in the array fail, I had to give the entire array up for a loss and test out my backup strategy. Fortunately it worked and there was no data loss. After receiving the replacement drives in from Seagate, I rebuilt the ZFS array (using raidz again) and went along my merry way. After another 6 months or so, I started getting some funky results from my other drive. Thinking it might have some issue as with the others, I removed the drive and ran Seatools on it (by the way, Seatools doesn’t offer a 64-bit Windows version – what year is this?).

The drive didn’t show any signs of failure, so I decided to wipe it and add it back into the array to see what happens. That, of course, is easier said than done.

One of the problems I ran into is that I am using Ubuntu and fuse to run zfs. Ubuntu has this nasty habit of changing around drive identifiers when USB devices are plugged in. So now when this drive is plugged in, it is on /dev/sde instead of /dev/sdd, which is now a USB attached drive.

No problem, I figure, I’ll offline the bad drive in the zpool and replace it with the new drive location. No such luck.

First I offlined the drive using zpool offline media /dev/sdd:

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dave@cerberus:~$ sudo zpool status
pool: media
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices has been taken offline by the administrator.
Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a
degraded state.
action: Online the device using 'zpool online' or replace the device with
'zpool replace'.
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
media DEGRADED 0 0 0
raidz1-0 DEGRADED 0 0 0
sdd OFFLINE 0 0 0
sdb ONLINE 0 0 0
sdc ONLINE 0 0 0

Now that it’s offline, I thought you should be able to detach it. No such luck – since it is a ‘primary’ device of the zpool it does not allow you to remove it.

1 2	dave@cerberus:~$ sudo zpool detach media /dev/sdd cannot detach /dev/sdd: only applicable to mirror and replacing vdevs

What they want you to do is replace the drive with another drive. This drive (the same drive, with all info wiped from it) is now on /dev/sde. I try to replace it:

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dave@cerberus:~$ sudo zpool replace media /dev/sdd /dev/sde
invalid vdev specification
use '-f' to override the following errors:
/dev/sde is part of active pool 'media'
dave@cerberus:~$ sudo zpool replace -f media /dev/sdd /dev/sde
invalid vdev specification
the following errors must be manually repaired:
/dev/sde is part of active pool 'media'

Even with -f it doesn’t allow the replacement, because the system thinks that the drive is part of another pool.

So basically you are stuck if trying to test a replacement with a drive that already been used in the pool. I’m sure I could replace it with another 1TB disk but what is the point of that?

I ended up resolving the problem by removing the external USB drive, therefore putting the drive back into the original /dev/sdd slot. Without issuing any commands, the system now sees the drive as the old one, and starts resilvering the drive.

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root@cerberus:/home/dave# zpool status
pool: media
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An
attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: resilver in progress for 0h9m, 4.62% done, 3h18m to go
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
media ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
sdd ONLINE 0 0 13 30.2G resilvered
sdb ONLINE 0 0 0
sdc ONLINE 0 0 0

It is interesting to see what it looks like from an i/o perspective. The system reads from the two good drives and writes to the new (bad) one. Using iostat -x:

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avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
29.77 0.00 13.81 32.81 0.00 23.60

Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util
sda 0.00 0.00 0.80 0.00 33.60 0.00 42.00 0.01 15.00 15.00 1.20
sdb 0.00 0.00 625.00 0.00 108033.20 0.00 172.85 0.56 0.90 0.49 30.80
sdc 0.00 0.00 624.20 0.00 107828.40 0.00 172.75 0.50 0.81 0.47 29.60
sdd 0.00 1.20 0.00 504.40 0.00 107729.60 213.58 9.52 18.85 1.98 100.00

It seems that ZFS is able to identify a hard drive by GID somehow but doesn’t automatically use it in the pool. This makes it so that you can’t test a drive by removing it, formatting it, and putting it into a new location. Basically, zfs assumes that your drives are always going to be in the same /dev location, which isn’t always true. As soon as you attach a USB drive in Ubuntu things are going to shift around.

After the resilver is complete, the zpool status is:

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root@cerberus:/home/dave# zpool status
pool: media
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An
attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: resilver completed after 0h16m with 0 errors on Sun May 15 07:35:46 2011
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
media ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
sdd ONLINE 0 0 13 50.0G resilvered
sdb ONLINE 0 0 0
sdc ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

You can now clear the error with:

1 2	root@cerberus:/home/dave# zpool clear media root@cerberus:/home/dave#

Zpool status now shows no errors:

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root@cerberus:/home/dave# zpool status
pool: media
state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed after 0h16m with 0 errors on Sun May 15 07:35:46 2011
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
media ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
sdd ONLINE 0 0 0 50.0G resilvered
sdb ONLINE 0 0 0
sdc ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

So now the question I have is this: Are you able to manually update or remove the drive status somewhere in your system? How did zfs know that this drive already had a pool installed on it? I zeroed the drive and verified with fdisk there were no partition on it. Is there a file somewhere on the system that stores this information, or is it written somewhere on the drive?

ZFS is great, but it still has some little issues like this that give me pause before using it in a production system. Then again, I suppose all massive disk array systems have their little quirks!

Disabling The hald-addon-storage Service On CentOS/RedHat

Dave — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:13:53 +0000

The hald – Hardware Access Layer Daemon – runs several processes in order to keep track of what hardware is installed on your system. This includes polling USB Drives and ‘hot-swap’ devices to check for changes along with a host of other tasks.

You might see it running on your system as follows:

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2474 ? S 0:00 \_ hald-runner
2481 ? S 0:00 \_ hald-addon-acpi: listening on acpid socket /var/run/acpid.socket
2487 ? S 0:00 \_ hald-addon-keyboard: listening on /dev/input/event0
2495 ? S 41:47 \_ hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/hdc

If your system is static and the devices do not change, you can actually disable this service using a policy entry.

Create a file in your policy directory, for example /etc/hal/fdi/policy/99-custom.fdi. Add the text:

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version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

version="0.2">
>
key="storage.removable" bool="true">
key="info.addons" type="strlist">hald-addon-storage>
>
>
>

Save and reload the hald using /etc/init.d/haldaemon restart.

And you will find that service no longer is polling your hardware.

Of course to turn it back on, remove that policy entry and restart the haldaemon again, it will be back in service.

Solution Credit: Linuxforums User cn77

Experimenting with Pascal on Ubuntu

Dave — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 02:35:44 +0000

I’ve been busy lately on a number of projects, one of which is a programming class I am currently taking. The class itself is interesting, we are learning about the different types of programming languages. For our latest project, we were tasked with writing a simple program in Pascal. Pascal isn’t used too much any more since it lacks some of the features that most modern languages have, but it is good to know at least a little bit about it in case you ever run across some old Pascal programs in the wild.

The syntax for pascal is a bit verbose, that is the main complaint about it. There are a number of others, but that is beyond the scope of this howto.

Installing The Pascal Compiler on Ubuntu

Installing Pascal in modern Ubuntu is a cinch. The Free Pascal Compiler, or fpc, is all that you need to get started. It works great on 32-bit or 64-bit systems. Install with:

1	sudo apt-get install fpc

Any prerequisites will automatically download and install along with fpc.

Getting Started in Pascal

To test the compiler let’s start with a simple Hello World program. Open up hello.pas and enter:

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program Hello;

begin

Writeln('Hello World');

end.

Compile with fpc hello.pas and run:

1 2	dave@cerberus:~/Pascal$ ./hello Hello World

Selection Sort in Pascal

Now that we’ve verified it is running, I’m going to show you the code that I wrote for my program. Basically we were asked to Selection Sort two arrays of varying length. Apparently one of the (bad) features of Pascal originally was that you needed to declare the length of the array which made it a pain to work with them.

In this situation it is just two arrays so it isn’t too bad. Enter your array by creating two text files arrayA.txt and arrayB.txt. One number per line. The source code for sort.pas is:

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program Sort;

var
A: array[1..10] of Integer;
B: array[1..20] of Integer;
F: Text;
i,j,k,l,m,temp: Integer;

begin
{Read in array A}
Assign(F, 'arrayA.txt');
Reset(F);
i:= 0;
while not EOF(F) do begin
Inc(i);
Read(F, A[i]);
end;

{Read in array B}
Assign(F, 'arrayB.txt');
Reset(F);
j:= 0;
while not EOF(F) do begin
Inc(j);
Read(F, B[j]);
end;
i:=10;
j:=20;

{Print out the unsorted arrays}
WriteLn('Unsorted Arrays:');
WriteLn('Array A:');
for k:=1 to i do
Write(A[k], ' ');
WriteLn();
WriteLn('Array B:');
for k:=1 to j do
Write(B[k], ' ');
WriteLn();
WriteLn('=========================');
WriteLn('Sorting Arrays...');
WriteLn('=========================');

{Selection Sort Array A}
for l := 1 to i do
for m := l + 1 to i do
if A[l] > A[m] then
begin
temp := A[l];
A[l] := A[m];
A[m] := temp;
end;
{Selection Sort Array B}
for l := 1 to j do
for m := l + 1 to j do
if B[l] > B[m] then
begin
temp := B[l];
B[l] := B[m];
B[m] := temp;
end;

{Print out the sorted arrays}
WriteLn('Selection Sorted Arrays:');
WriteLn('Array A: ');
for k:=1 to i do
Write(A[k], ' ');
WriteLn();
WriteLn('Array B: ');
for k:=1 to j do
Write(B[k], ' ');
WriteLn();
end.

Compile and run (ok to ignore the compile-time errors)

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dave@cerberus:~/Pascal$ fpc sort.pas
Free Pascal Compiler version 2.4.0-2 [2010/03/06] for x86_64
Copyright (c) 1993-2009 by Florian Klaempfl
Target OS: Linux for x86-64
Compiling sort.pas
Linking sort
/usr/bin/ld: warning: link.res contains output sections; did you forget -T?
73 lines compiled, 0.1 sec
dave@cerberus:~/Pascal$ ./sort
Unsorted Arrays:
Array A:
28 24 85 55 43 6 23 13 59 71
Array B:
13 37 36 53 24 83 27 42 62 71 9 92 1 41 6 3 88 77 65 67
=========================
Sorting Arrays...
=========================
Selection Sorted Arrays:
Array A:
6 13 23 24 28 43 55 59 71 85
Array B:
1 3 6 9 13 24 27 36 37 41 42 53 62 65 67 71 77 83 88 92
dave@cerberus:~/Pascal$

And there you have it. Compiling Pascal program on Ubuntu is an easy way to get your feet wet in programming. Pascal is a great beginner’s programming language, but if you want to learn more there are a number of great resources available for learning Pascal.

Adding Random Quotes to the Bash Login Screen

Dave — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:49:13 +0000

According to “official” system administrator rules and guidelines you shouldn’t be adding so-called vain scripts to the login prompt – only utilities that will add something useful to the system (for example, current system load, memory and disk usage, etc). However I have some systems that I frequently connect to and thought it would be neat to add a random quote script to my bash login. That being said, this should only be done on ‘non-production’ systems and adds a security vector so please be careful where you use this.

The goal of this is to add a little quote, at random, every time you log into your system. My thoughts were to do it not only as a little source of inspiration but also to add perspective to what I’m doing sitting in front of the computer all of the time.

Originally I was going to try to write the script solely in bash since it is so flexible (and just as a proof of concept) but dealing with RSS in bash isn’t exactly pretty and I just wanted to get this together as quick as possible. PHP makes parsing XML easy, there are a number of ways to accomplish it. I chose to use the ready-made script at rssphp.net to do this, if you are curious about how you can handle this yourself using SimpleXML check out this tutorial over at Pixel2Life. The end result of my solution is a bash script calling a php script to grab the quote.

The Code

First create a file named /etc/update-motd.d/10-quote. The name does not matter much – the number will decide what order the script is called in of all the scripts in /etc/update-motd.d. Do an ls on that directory to see what all is being called when you log in. Add the following lines to this file, assuming you are placing your scripts in /etc/scripts/:

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#!/bin/sh
echo ""
/usr/bin/php /etc/scripts/getquote.php
echo ""

Download v1 of rssphp and extract it to the /etc/scripts/ directory. We will require that file in our php code.

Create the file /etc/scripts/getquote.php and add the following:

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require_once 'rss_php.php';

$rss = new rss_php;
$rss->load('http://www.quotedb.com/quote/quote.php?action=random_quote_rss');
$rssitems = $rss->getItems();

if ($rssitems) {
// print_r($rssitems);
echo $rssitems[0]['description'].' :: '.$rssitems[0]['title']."\n";
}

?>

I am using the RSS source from QuoteDB as the source of my quotes. Of all the places I checked (and I checked a lot) they seemed to have the most appropriate ones for this use. Feel free to use any source you wish – as long as the XML fields title/description hold the quote you will be able to use it. The RSS url was not obvious from the site and I had to do some digging to find it, in the end I am using http://www.quotedb.com/quote/quote.php?action=random_quote_rss.

We also add the if statement to allow it to degrade nicely in case you have no network connectivity to the server. After a short period – a second or two – it will time out and let you log in.

The end result is a pretty quote in our motd:

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Linux vps01.[redacted].com 2.6.18-2-pve #1 SMP Mon Feb 1 10:45:26 CET 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS

"The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously." :: Henry Kissinger

root@vps01:~#

It should be pretty strait forward; let me know if you run into any problems!

Find Out If A Twitter Username Exists Using PHP/JSON

Dave — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 03:32:11 +0000

I’ve been trying to grab a Twitter screenname that people continually register and do not use. Twitter eventually deletes it, but I suppose it is in high enough demand that someone else registers it right away (and then continues to never use it). Wrote up a quick and dirty php script to check the Twitter API to see if a screenname exists and if it doesn’t, shoot a short an email. I’ve been using changedetection to roughly do the same thing but it has fallen short on two counts: the first is that it reports follower count changes, and second it only runs once a day and this hasn’t been fast enough for me to grab my desired screen name.

You can set this script to run via cron at any desired interval, I’ve set it to run every 30 minutes for me. Test with sample information to make sure it works under your setup. I’m using the default mail() function, and I also included some json decoding in there so you could also use this script to play around with decoding a user’s information in PHP.

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/* Copyright (c) 2010 Dave Drager
*
* Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
* of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
* in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
* to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
* copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
* furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
*
* The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
* all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
*
* THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
* IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
* FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
* AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
* LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
* OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
* THE SOFTWARE.
*/

/* README
* This is a simple script to check a username on Twitter and send a short email
* if it is not found. It's the simplest way I found to do this. Using the
* sample code you could also modify it simply to do something with a
* found username as well. Details are in the $json_output array. Enjoy
*/

// fill in these 2 variables below
$username = "someusername";
$notifyemail = "your_email@address";

// this is needed otherwise file_get_contents errors out
error_reporting(0);
$url="http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=".$username;
$json = file_get_contents($url,0,null,null);

if($http_response_header[0] == "HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found") {
//echo "Screen name not taken!\n";
$to = $notifyemail;
$subject = 'Screen name now available - '.$username;
$message = 'The screen name '.$username.' is now available on Twitter.';
$headers = 'From: '.$notifyemail . "\r\n";
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers, '-f '.$notifyemail);
}
else {
// screen name exists - you can do something here if you want
//$json_output = json_decode($json,true);
//print_r($json_output);
}
?>

If you are running it from cron, add the sample entry:

1	0 * * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/script.php

The above would run the script every hour on the hour.

Of course you can easily modify this sample code if you are looking to do any kind of similar checking in your web app. If you find this kind of script useful, please let me know!

Using Google Analytics Or Other Javascript With Smarty Template Engine

Dave — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 20:45:53 +0000

On a website I was working on recently I added the Google Analytics tracking code to the footer of a Smarty template, like this:

footer.tpl:

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However, since the javascript used by Google Analytics includes { and } tags, also used by the Smarty template engine, it tries to interpret this code and depending on your settings will either fail silently or or with an error such as this:

Smarty error: [in footer.tpl line 148]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'var'

The fix is simple. Enclose your Google Analytics code, or other javascript code, with {literal} and {/literal}. The literal tag allows you to place code to be displayed, well, literally.

The final code will look something like this:

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{literal}

<script type="text/javascript">

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-XX']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();

</script>

{/literal}

</body>
</html>

Your website should now run properly with the Google Analytics code in place.

A phpBB 3 iPhone Style Theme With Option to Disable

Dave — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:34:37 +0000

A forum that I am an adminstrator for has been clamoring for an iPhone theme (style) for a long time now. In the past, I hadn’t seen any usable iPhone template for phpBB3, until now.

The theme is hosted on Google code and is named phpbb-iphone-style. It is downloadable here and was last updated June 18th, as of today.

The theme works wonderfully on the iPhone. However, the issue that I ran into is automatically displaying it for mobile browsers, such as the iPhone, Android and other platforms.

Fortunately there is a modification you can make to the phpbb code which is effectively a theme switcher for mobile browsers. The how to is located within the download file for the theme above.

What if a user wants to turn off the mobile style?

I modified the code to allow a user to set an option on their profile to permentently disable the theme when logged in on a mobile browser.

First, install the style as described above. As part of the switcher, you need to find out the theme ID. You can do so, after installing the style, by hovering over the ‘Detail’ tab in the ACP (Administrator Control Panel) and looking for the ‘id’ variable. In the example below it is ’6′.

Once the theme is installed, move over to the “Users and Groups” tab, and then the “Custom Profile Fields” area. At the bottom of this page there is a box to add a new profile field. Type ‘disable_mobile’ as the name, and Boolean (Yes/No) as the type and click add.

For the options, I selected:

Publicly display profile field: No
Display in user control panel: Checked
Display on registration screen: Unchecked
Display on viewtopic screen: Unchecked
Required field: Unchecked
Hide profile field: Unchecked
Field name/title presented to the user: Disable Mobile Browser
Field description: When viewing on a mobile device (iPhone, Android, etc), clicking ‘yes’ will disable the mobile browser.
Entries: First option: Yes, Second option: No

On the second screen select the following items:

Field type: Radio Buttons
Default value: no

Save your custom profile field.

It will end up looking like this in the profile control panel of the end user:

Now the fun part, adding the code to your install to select which mobile browser to use automatically.

Back up, then open install dir/includes/session.php

Around line 1468 in the function setup

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/**
* Setup basic user-specific items (style, language, ...)
*/
function setup($lang_set = false, $style = false)
{

Replace

1	global $db, $template, $config, $auth, $phpEx, $phpbb_root_path, $cache;

with

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global $db, $template, $config, $auth, $phpEx, $phpbb_root_path, $cache, $user;

//-----Begin phone detection & redirection code-----

$user->get_profile_fields( $user->data['user_id'] );
$user_fields = $user->profile_fields;

// if (!($user_fields['pf_disable_mobile'] == 1)) {
// Thanks to Chris Dembek for this code fix
if (isset($user_fields['pf_disable_mobile']) && !($user_fields['pf_disable_mobile'] == 1))

//id of the iphone/mobile theme - SELECT THIS FROM YOUR STYLES
$mobilestyleid = 6;

//Fetch the users browser
$user_browser = strtolower($this->browser);

//List of mobile user-agent keywords
$browsers_array = array('240x320', '320x240','blackberry', 'iemobile', 'minimobile', 'mobile', 'opera mini', 'pda', 'phone', 'pocket', 'psp', 'symbian', 't-shark', 'wireless');

//Check for the user-agent in the list of mobile user-agents
foreach ($browsers_array as $ua_match) {
if (strpos($user_browser, $ua_match) !== false) { //a match
$style = $mobilestyleid;
$this->data['is_mobile'] = true;
break;
}
}

}

//-----End phone detection/redirection code-----

Make sure to replace $mobilestyleid = 6 with your style id number!

Save your file. Test out the modifications on your phone, you should be presented with the mobile version on reload (make sure to purge any cache if you don’t see it right away).

Finally go into your profile and select the ‘disable mobile browser’ option and make sure it reverts back to your regular default theme.

Let me know if you have any problems implementing this but it has worked great for this phpbb forum!

Another Bash One Liner To Delete Old Directories

Dave — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:05:58 +0000

We received a tip from blog readers Christian and Michael for alternatives to the command to delete all directories older than a certain period of time. These both work in bash and can be used in scripts to clean up old backup directories or any situation where you need to delete old directories from the command line.

From Christian:

find /home/backup/ -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +7 -exec rm -r {} \;

From Michael:

find /home/backup/ -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +7 -exec echo “Removing Directory => {}” \; -exec rm -rf “{}” \;

The first one works quietly, while the second one will display what is being deleted. These are probably faster than putting it into a for loop, so feel free to use whatever works best in your particular situation!

One Line Linux Command to Print Out Directory Tree Listing

Dave — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:41:55 +0000

My professor sent us this little one liner (ok, I had to format it to 2 lines to fit in this blog. You know what I mean) which prints out the current directory tree:

ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' \
-e 's/^/ /' -e 's/-/|/'

What’s going on here?

1
ls -R

– list files and directories recursively
1
grep ":$"

– find lines with : at the end (so only the directories)
1
sed -e

– evaluate expressions on the lines
1
s/:$//

– remove ‘:’ at the end of the line
1
s/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g

– replaces text between / / lines (parent directories) with — , globally on each line
1
s/^/ /

– add space at the beginning of the lines
1
s/-/|/

– replace first – of the line with |

I reduced this using the following command. The most notable difference is that I use find instead of ls, which results in also viewing .hidden directories. I’m not sure which command is faster.

find ./ -type d | sed -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g;s/--/ |-/'

Both commands result in a formatted directory listing, demonstrated below:

|-sitetransfer
 |---redacteddomain.com
 |-----cache
 |-----templates
 |-------skidoo_too
 |---------images
 |-----------_vti_cnf
 |---------css
 |-----------_vti_cnf
 |---------js
 |-----------scriptaculous
 |-------------src
 |-------------lib
 |---------admin_templates