php --info | grep -i 'configure command'

While searching for a solution about this, I ran across an interesting project, phpa. From the developer:

phpa is an interactive command line shell for PHP.

It is a replacement for the interactive mode of the PHP interpreter (php -a), hence the name.

This software is public domain.

Before using it, make sure php-readline is installed:

yum install php-readline

I downloaded phpa and set the executable bit as shown below:

wget -O - http://david.acz.org/phpa/phpa.txt > ~/bin/phpa
chmod +x ~/bin/phpa

I also had to fix the bad shebang:

sed -i 's#/usr/local/bin/php#/usr/bin/php#' ~/bin/phpa

Finally, an interactive PHP shell! Now running code snippets from the PHP manual is fun:

[rocky@arena ~]$ phpa
PHP 5.1.6 (cli) (Jan 13 2010 17:05:38) [Linux]
>>> $arr = array("somearray" => array(6 => 5, 13 => 9, "a" => 42));
>>>
>>> echo $arr["somearray"][6];    // 5
5
>>> echo $arr["somearray"][13];   // 9
9
>>> echo $arr["somearray"]["a"];  // 42
42
>>>

Enjoy your new PHP interactive interpreter!

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RPM

For RPMs you need two command line utilities, rpm2cpio and cpio. Extracting the contents of the RPM package is a one step process:

rpm2cpio mypackage.rpm | cpio -vid

If you just need to list the contents of the package without extracting them, use the following:

rpm2cpio mypackage.rpm | cpio -vt

The -v option is used in order to get verbose output to the stdout. If you don’t need it, you can safely omit this switch. For more information about the cpio options, please refer to the cpio(1) manual page.

DEB

DEB files are ar archives, which contain three files:

• debian-binary
• control.tar.gz
• data.tar.gz

As you might have already guessed, the needed archived files exist in data.tar.gz. It is also obvious that unpacking this file is a two-step process.

First, extract the aforementioned three files from the DEB file (ar archive):

ar vx mypackage.deb

Then extract the contents of data.tar.gz using tar:

tar -xzvf data.tar.gz

Or, if you just need to get a listing of the files:

tar -tzvf data.tar.gz

Again the -v option in both ar and tar is used in order to get verbose output. It is safe not to use it. For more information, read the man pages: tar(1) and ar(1).

If anyone knows a one step process to extract the contents of the data.tar.gz, I’d be very interested in it!

Update

As Jon suggested in the comment area, the contents of data.tar.gz can be extracted from the DEB package in a one step process as shown below:

ar p mypackage.deb data.tar.gz | tar zx

That will do it.

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A while ago I had written a script that would automate the WordPress upgrade process. Such a program could have been a simple shell script, just a few lines of code. However, I decided to write a more flexible script in Python instead, which can keep backups, perform a thorough upgrade of the website’s platform, keep the files I need to keep etc. A script that takes good care of everything while upgrading is also a good idea because it minimizes downtime while performing upgrades. Today was the first time to test it. After the upgrade, everything seems to be where it should. The script is in pre-alpha state and despite the fact that I used it on my website, it is not ready for release yet. Below is the output of the upgrade on G-Loaded:

# python wpupgrade.py 2.3.1
info: ++ Performings Tests. Please wait...
info: Initial configuration checks - OK
info: Retrieval of WordPress database settings from wp-config.php - OK
info: Checking existence of mysqldump - OK
info: ++ Starting data backup. Please wait...
info: Database backup - OK
info: Filesystem backup - OK
info: Data backup Complete
info: ++ Downloading wordpress archive. Please wait...
info: Download and Verification Complete
info: ++ Removing old WordPress files and directories. Listing follows:
info: Removed DIR: wp-admin
info: Removed DIR: wp-includes - PRESERVED wp-includes/languages
warning: --> DIR wp-content/cache CANNOT BE REMOVED - NOT CRITICAL - REMOVE MANUALLY IF POSSIBLE
info: Removed FILE: wp-commentsrss2.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-rss.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-rdf.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-login.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-app.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-settings.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-comments-post.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-mail.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-rss2.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-pass.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-blog-header.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-register.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-feed.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-trackback.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-cron.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-links-opml.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-config-sample.php
info: Removed FILE: wp-atom.php
info: Removed FILE: index.php
info: Removed FILE: xmlrpc.php
info: Removed FILE: readme.html
info: Removed FILE: license.txt
info: WordPress files removal complete
info: ++ WordPress Upgrade
info: Writing new files. Please wait...
info: File Upgrade Complete
info: ++ Starting Cleanup
info: Nothing - TODO
info: Finish Upgrade by visiting: http://www.yoursite.org/wp-admin/upgrade.php

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Theory

Rapidshare uses cookie-based authentication. This means that every time you log into the service, a cookie containing information which identifies you as a registered user is stored in your browser’s cookie cache. Both wget and curl support saving and loading cookies, so before using them to download any files, you should save such a cookie. Having done this, then the only required action in order download from RapidShare is to load the cookie, so that wget or curl can use it to authenticate you on the RapidShare server. This is pretty much the same you would do with a graphical download manager. The difference now is that you do it on the command line.

Below you will find examples about how to perform these actions using both wget and curl.

IMPORTANT: Please note that in order to use these command-line utilities or any other download managers with RapidShare, you will have to check the Direct Downloads option in your account’s options page.

Save your RapidShare Premium Account Cookie

Saving your RapidShare cookie is a procedure that needs to be done once.

The login page is located at:

https://ssl.rapidshare.com/cgi-bin/premiumzone.cgi

The login form requires two fields: login and password. These are pretty self-explanatory.

In the following examples, the RapidShare username is shown as USERNAME and the password as PASSWORD.

Using wget

In order to save your cookie using wget, run the following:

wget \
    --save-cookies ~/.cookies/rapidshare \
    --post-data "login=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD" \
    -O - \
    https://ssl.rapidshare.com/cgi-bin/premiumzone.cgi \
    > /dev/null

–save-cookies : Saves the cookie to a file called rapidshare under the ~/.cookies directory (let’s assume that you store your cookies there)
–post-data : is the POST payload of the request. In other words it contains the data you would enter in the login form.
-O - : downloads the HTML data to the standard output. Since the above command is run only in order to obtain the cookie, this option prints the HTML data to stdout (Standard Output) and then discards it by redirecting stdout to /dev/null. If you don’t do this, wget will save the HTML data in a file called premiumzone.cgi in the current directory. This is just the Rapidshare HTML page, which is absolutely not needed.

Using curl

In order to save your cookie using curl, run the following:

curl \
    --cookie-jar ~/.cookies/rapidshare \
    --data "login=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD" \
    https://ssl.rapidshare.com/cgi-bin/premiumzone.cgi \
    > /dev/null

–cookie-jar : Saves the cookie to a file called rapidshare under the ~/.cookies directory (it has been assumed previously that cookies are stored there)
–data : contains the data you would enter in the login form.
Curl prints the downloaded page data to stdout by default. This is discarded by sending it to /dev/null.

Download files using your RapidShare Premium Account Cookie

Having saved your cookie, downloading files from RapidShare is as easy as telling wget/curl to load the cookie everytime you use them to download a file.

Downloading with wget

In order to download a file with wget, run the following:

wget -c --load-cookies ~/.cookies/rapidshare <URL>

-c : this is used in order to resume downloading of the file if it already exists in the current directory and is incomplete.
–load-cookies : loads your cookie.

Downloading with curl

In the same manner, in order to download a file with curl, run the following:

curl -L -O --cookie ~/.cookies/rapidshare <URL>

-L : Follows all redirections until the final destination page is found. This switch is almost always required as curl won’t follow redirects by default (read about how to check the server http headers with curl).
-O : By using this switch you instruct curl to save the downloaded data to a file in the current directory. The filename of the remote file is used. This switch is also required or else curl will print the data to stdout, which is something you won’t probably like.
–cookie : loads your Rapidshare account’s cookie.

Setting up a Download Server

Although most users would be satisfied with the above, I wouldn’t be surprised if you would want to go a bit further and try to setup a little service for your downloading pleasure. Here is a very primitive implementation of such a service. All you will need is standard command line tools.

This primitive server consists of the following:

1. A named pipe, called “dlbasket“. You will feed the server with URLs through this pipe. Another approach would be to use a listening TCP socket with NetCat.
2. A script, which, among others, contains the main server loop. This loop reads one URL at a time from dlbasket and starts a wget/curl process in order to download the file. If dlbasket is empty, the server should just stay there waiting.

So, in short, the service would be the following:

cat <> dlbasket | ( while ... done )

All credit for the “cat <> dlbasket |” magic goes to Zart, who kindly helped me out at the #fedora IRC channel.

So, let’s create that service. The following assume that a user named “downloader” exists in the system and the home directory is /var/lib/downloader/. Of course you can set this up as you like, but make sure you adjust the following commands and the script’s configuration options accordingly.

First, create the named pipe:

mkfifo -m 0700 /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket

If it does not exist, create a bin directory in the user’s home:

mkdir -p /var/lib/downloader/bin

Also, create a directory where the downloaded files will be saved:

mkdir -p /var/lib/downloader/downloads

The following is a quick and dirty script I wrote which actually implements the service. Save it as rsgetd.sh inside the user’s bin directory:

#! /usr/bin/env bash  
 
#  rsgetd.sh - Download Service
 
#  Version 0.3
 
#  Copyright (C) 2007 George Notaras (http://www.g-loaded.eu/)
#
#  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as
#  published by the Free Software Foundation.
#
#  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#  GNU General Public License for more details.
 
# Special thanks to 'Zart' from the #fedora channel on FreeNode
 
# v0.3 - Oct 31 2009:
# - corrected error: "./bin/rsgetd.sh: line 37: [: argument expected"
 
# CONFIG START 
HOMEDIR="/var/lib/downloader"
DLBASKET="$HOMEDIR/dlbasket"
DLDIR="$HOMEDIR/downloads/"
LOGFILE="$HOMEDIR/.downloads_log"
CACHEFILE="$HOMEDIR/.downloads_cache"
LIMIT="25k"
WGETBIN="/usr/bin/wget"
# Rapidshare Login Cookie  
RSCOOKIE="$HOMEDIR/cookies/.rapidshare"
# CONFIG END
 
DATETIME="`date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`"
 
cat <> $DLBASKET | (
        while read url ; do
                # First, check the cache if the file has been already downloaded
                if [ -f "$CACHEFILE" -a -n "$(grep -i $(basename $url) $CACHEFILE)" ] ; then
                       echo "$DATETIME File exists in cache. Already downloaded - Skipping: $url" >> $LOGFILE
                else
                        echo "$DATETIME Starting with rate $LIMIT/s: $url" >> $LOGFILE
                        if [ $(expr match "$url" '[rapidshare.com]') = 1 ] ; then
                                # If it is a Rapidshare.com link, load the RS cookie 
                                echo "RAPIDSHARE LINK"
                                $WGETBIN -c --limit-rate=$LIMIT --directory-prefix=$DLDIR --load-cookies $RSCOOKIE $url
                        else
                                $WGETBIN -c --limit-rate=$LIMIT --directory-prefix=$DLDIR $url
                        fi
                        echo "$DATETIME Finished: $url" >> $LOGFILE
                        echo $url >> $CACHEFILE
                fi
        done )
 
exit 0

As you might have already noticed, two extra files are created inside the home directory: .downloads_cache and .downloads_log. The first contains a list of all the urls that have been downloaded. Each new download is checked against this list, so that the particular URL is not processed if the file has already been downloaded. The latter file is a usual logfile stating the start and end times of each download. Feel free to adjust the script to your needs.

Here is some info about how you should start the service:

-1- You can simply start the script as a background process and then feed URLs to it. For example:

rsgetd.sh &
echo "<URL>" > /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket

-2- Use screen in order to run the script in the background but still be able to see its output by connecting to a screen session. Although this is not a screen howto, here is an example:

Create a new screen session and attach to it:

screen -S rs_downloads

While being in the session, run rsgetd.sh

rsgetd.sh

From another terminal feed the download basket (dlbasket) with urls:

echo "<URL>" > /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket
cat url_list.txt > /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket

Watch the files in the screen window as they are being downloaded.

Detach from the screen session by hitting the following:

Ctrl-a   d

Re-attach to the session by running:

screen -r

Note that you do not need to be attached to the screen session in order to add URLs.

Feeding the basket with URLs remotely

Assuming that a SSH server is running on the machine that runs rsgetd.sh, you can feed URLs to it by running the following from a remote machine:

ssh downloader@server.example.org cat \> /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket

Note that the > needs to be escaped so that it is considered as part of the command that will be executed on the remote server.

Now, feel free to add as many URLs as you like. After you hit the [Enter] key the url will be added to the download queue. When you are finished, just press Ctrl-D to end the URL submission.

Conclusion

This article provides all the information you need in order to use wget or curl to download files from your RapidShare Premium account. Also, information on how to set up a service that will assist you in order to commence downloads on your home server from a remote location has been covered.

The same information applies in all cases that wget and curl need to be used with websites that use cookie-based authentication.

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Add the necessary code

The code that needs to be added to the user menu is the following:

+ t r & ! t t
d       Diff against file of same name in other directory
        if [ "%d" = "%D" ]; then
          echo "The two directores must be different"
          exit 1
        fi
        if [ -f %D/%f ]; then        # if two of them, then
          diff -up %f %D/%f | sed -e 's/\(^-.*\)/\x1b[1;31m\1\x1b[0m/g' \
                                  -e 's/\(^\+.*\)/\x1b[1;32m\1\x1b[0m/g' \
                                  -e 's/\(^@.*\)/\x1b[36m\1\x1b[0m/g' | less -R
        else
          echo %f: No copy in %D/%f
        fi
D       Diff current directory against other directory
        if [ "%d" = "%D" ]; then
          echo "The two directores must be different"
          exit 1
        fi
        diff -up %d %D | sed -e 's/\(^-.*\)/\x1b[1;31m\1\x1b[0m/g' \
                             -e 's/\(^\+.*\)/\x1b[1;32m\1\x1b[0m/g' \
                             -e 's/\(^@.*\)/\x1b[36m\1\x1b[0m/g' | less -R
        fi

The code snippet is a contribution by James Ogley to this OpenSUSE wiki page about Midnight Commander and is released under the GFDL 1.2 license.

Here are the instructions on how to add this code to the user menu:

1. Having launched Midnight Commander, press F9
2. Go to the Command menu and hit the Edit menu file
3. MC lets you customize the user menu for the current directory [Local], current user [Home] or make the modification system-wide. You will need to be root to change the latter. Most probably the Home choice is what you need.
4. You can now paste the code block between two other user-defined commands.

How to use these actions

In order to show the differences between two versions of the same file, browse to the directories that contain each version, so that the directory in panel A contains the A version of some.file and the directory in panel B contains the B version of some.file. Then press F2 and lowercase d.

In order to show the differences between the contents of the directories in the two panels, just press F2 and then uppercase D.

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Good ASCII art can take time and talent to look just right, but you can skip through that effort with AAlib, a library devoted to converting any image into an ASCII art equivalent. Since a movie is basically a system of moving images, MPlayer has added support for AAlib as a video output option. This means that each frame in the movie is converted to an ASCII equivalent and displayed on the screen.

Software that is used to accomplish the task includes MPlayer multimedia player built with support for the ASCII art library (aalib) and the color ASCII art library (libcaca).

Read the full article here

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The Windows port of mkisofs and, generally, the Win32 binaries of all the utilities included in the cdrtools package can be found in the Cdrtools: Win32 Binaries page. Please note that the page also includes a Win32 binary version of the latest (unstable) version of cdrtools. It is highly recommended to use the latest stable version.

So, change to the directory that contains the Windows installation files and issue the following command:

mkisofs \
    -b cdboot/msboot.img -no-emul-boot -boot-load-seg 1984 -boot-load-size 4 \
    -iso-level 2 -J -l -D -N -joliet-long -relaxed-filenames \
    -V "WINSP" \
    -o ../winsp.iso .

The above command ends with a dot (.).

All of the above flags seem to be necessary in order to relax many of the ISO restrictions. For more information about each of them please refer to the mkisofs (or genisoimage) manual page (man 8 mkisofs).

This tip assumes that the boot image which is used in the Microsoft bootable CDs is available and that it has been placed in a cdboot/ subdirectory under the windows installation files root dir:

.
    cdboot/msboot.img
    other_dir/some_other_file
    file1
    file2

I admit that this is a nasty workaround, but I didn’t have enough time to investigate why the -b option caused that much trouble. The path to the boot image which is supplied with the -b option is supposed to be a relative path to the path of the root directory of the windows files, which is our current directory, aka (.). But, everytime I placed the msboot.img outside the win files directory and used -b ../msboot.img, mkisofs complained with the following pesky error message:

mkisofs: Uh oh, I cant find the boot image '../msboot.img' !

It didn’t make any sense, so I did not bother any more with it. If you have any info on this or if I miss anything, which is rather possible since I have spent very little time with this, your feedback is appreciated.

The above command will produce an image of a bootable Windows CD, which will also contain the boot image. But, this should not be a problem in any case.

Note that the ISO image will be saved in the parent directory of the one that holds the Windows files.

Note: How to integrate a service pack into a Windows OS is beyond the scope of this document. There are numerous guides out there that cover this topic in great detail.

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The Postscript output can be piped to lpr for printing in a CUPS printer. The following example prints the iptables manual page to the HP690C printer:

$ man -t iptables | lpr -P HP690C

Alternatively, the output can be saved to a postscript file:

$ man -t iptables > iptables.ps

More on using a CUPS printer from the CLI can be found here.

Those who have the Yelp GNOME application installed, can take advantage of its internal man page parser and HTML converter. For example, in order to display the iptables man page in Yelp, launch it like the following:

$ yelp man:iptables

From there, you can use the GNOME print dialog to print the iptables manual.

I tend to prefer the quality of the man page when it has been printed through Yelp.

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Recently, I had to install the SecureFTP ftp client for linux, but the script errored out with some strange messages like not being able to uncompress the archive or about not being able to verify the archive’s checksum or about wrong command line parameters used in some command calls internally. This had happened in the past too, when I wanted to install the good old game Unreal Tournament (1999) so to revive some good memories. ;-)

Here are some of the weird error messages:

tail: cannot open `+187' for reading: No such file or directory
gunzip: stdin: not in gzip format
Verifying archive integrity...tail: cannot open `+6' for reading: No such file or directory
Error in check sums 1237260170 2341625838

As stated at the makeself website, archives created with Makeself older than v2.1.2 were using an old syntax for the head and tail Unix commands and there are problems uncompressing the included software.

In order to resolve this issue and make the installer “assume” that you use an old GNU/Linux version, you should export the following environment variable before using the installer:

export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209

After you finish installing the software, delete that ENV variable:

unset _POSIX2_VERSION

It took me a significant amount of time to learn about this workaround and, basically, I discovered it while searching for the software that creates these self-installing archives.

Hope this tip helps someone out there.

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Tom Newsom writes in his article:

In this document I shall be showing you how you can run, for testing purposes perhaps, two versions of Slackware simultaneously. Both will be fully fledged installs and both will be fully usable. It is possible to run other distributions via this method as well but I shall leave that aim as an exercise for the reader. Once you know how it is done then doing it for alternative distributions is a natural progression of your newly acquired skills.

Read the full article here

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