Vim scripting the hard way

You have to respect someone who writes a book titled this!

http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/

There is this little pearl in the front page (I tend to loose my .vimrc!!!):

"To easily find the location and name of the file on any operating system, run :echo $MYVIMRC"

So I'll read on...

little things make all the difference

<esc> v takes you straight to your favourite editor in bash... ah bliss... no more wrestling with crippled command line editing for me!!

why did no-one tell me!!

Drush (aka drupal from bash)

Drush is cool...

# put a link to drush in your bin
ln /usr/local/bin/drush/drush bin/drush

mkdir ~/.drush
touch ~/.drush/aliases.drushrc.php 
# pinch another users alias file to get you started:
cp /home/michaeldance/.drush/aliases.drushrc.php .drush/

# edit alias file:
vim ~/.drush/aliases.drushrc.php

# see your aliases
drush sa

# chose an alias
drush use @prod

# check your good to go:
drush st

#drop into an sql shell
drush @ubox sqlc

# check the watchdog
drush watchdog-show

# clear the menu cache
drush @prod cc

# list the packages (eg modules/themes)
drush @prod pml
# filtering them with grep
drush @prod pml | grep agc

# review the watchdog-list
drush @ubox watchdog-list

#fire up the cron
drush @ubox cron

# list your packages 
drush @ubox pml


# disable a package
drush @ubox dis activitystream_feed

Coping with funny file names

I thought that spaces and other odd things in file names was just an irritating Windows thing, but no, it appears the contagion is now part of linux too.

Both the Swiss-army-knife commands find and xargs will cope tho, with just a little tweaking:

find /myfolder -type f -size +1M -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

Find, unsurprisingly finds a list of files matching a criteria. Xargs then does something with them. In this case we're just listing files bigger than 1 meg.

Slightly related to this is the challenge of removing files with odd file names. A good tip is the -i flag on rm:

rm -i c*

This will check with you for each file starting with c.

MySQL from bash

It turns out I've been accessing my favourite database from bash the hard way.

I just needed to make a MySQL configuration file in my home directory and set the permissions:

echo "
[client]
user=purple_drupal6
password=metoknow
host=ord-mysql-001-sn.bananas.net.au
[mysql]
database=nz_drupal" > .my.cnf

chmod 0600 ~/.my.cnf

 So that's easy.

Now I can just call mysql as a single word.... or better still do stuff like back up a table:

t=agc_geo_set

mysqldump au_drupal $t | gzip > $t.sql.gz

then to reload

cat $t.sql.gz  | gunzip | mysql

Running sql into the database from the shell is also a joy.

Having a quick look at a query is simple, and I can page through the results with less.

echo "
SELECT *
FROM agc_geo_set
" | mysql | less

Because I'm doing this from bash I can do variable substitution and reformat the output as I like it:

start=5
finish=10
echo "
SELECT *
FROM $t
WHERE id BETWEEN $start AND $finish
" | mysql | tocsv > $t.csv

Or copy permissions from one user to another:

u1=billblogs

u2=janeayre
echo "show grants for $u1;" | mysql | sed "s/$u1/$u2/" | grep "GRANT SELECT" | mysql

vim oh how I love thee

every day I get to love it more and more...

my favourite .vimrc line is, by a million miles:

imap jj <esc>

i also like this one:
" make f6 do an inner select on here docs:
nmap <F6> ?<<<<CR>w*kV?<<<<CR>j

This finds all lines containing word and adds them to a file:

:g/word/.w!>>filename

sort (unique) a range (as with all things works in visual mode too!):

:1,16sort u


but note to self must add these to my vimrc:

" Treat long lines as break lines (useful when moving around in them)
map j gj
map k gk

" Smart way to move between windows
map <C-j> <C-W>j
map <C-k> <C-W>k
map <C-h> <C-W>h
map <C-l> <C-W>l

Deleting or backing up a directory in linux

You'd think I'd be able to remember this:

    rm -rf directory

Nuh

or this

mkdir ../bin2
cp -r * ../bin2
ls ../bin2

its not really rocket science

This will pick up all the files in a directory (but skip the svn files):

tar -cvz $d/* > dust.tar.gz