m3rlin.ws

Up until recently, I’d never needed to delete files automatically that were less than a day old. There is a useful switch you can pass to find that lets you return files that haven’t been changed in x minutes, and that can be used for temporary file cleanups or whatever.

Here it is:

find /tmp/foo/ -type f -cmin +180 | xargs /bin/rm -rf

That will return any files inside /tmp/foo/ that haven’t been changed in at least 3 hours.

This just caught me out.

If you are dealing with large file uploads with PHP, be warned that PHP uses an integer for the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size config variables. That means, you cannot set those values higher than 2147483647 bytes. Trying to use 2048M for example, will result in an error like this:

Aug 29 21:12:48 svr php-cgi: PHP Warning:  Unknown: POST Content-Length of 41 bytes exceeds the limit of -2147483648 bytes in Unknown on line 0

Whenever something is posted to the server (even simple name-value pairs). This will happen on both 32bit and 64bit machines.

This is clearly stated in the manual, but I totally missed it!

I just had an issue pop up while creating a WordPress Plugin that uses a custom, top-level administration menu. If I created a top-level menu called “Foo”, a submenu would be created beneath it that had the same link and title. A picture describes the issue better:

The code used to generate the broken example above, is:

add_menu_page(__('Foo'), __('Foo'), 'manage_options', 'foo.php');
add_submenu_page('foo.php', __('Bar'), __('Bar'), 'manage_options', 'bar.php', 'bar');

That clearly sucks, and isn’t what I wanted in this situation. What you need to do instead is change the add_submenu_page function to:

add_submenu_page('foo.php', __('Bar'), __('Bar'), 'manage_options', 'foo.php', 'bar');

* Note the second-to-last param now matches the one in add_menu_page()

That clears up the issue nicely. For what it’s worth, this is clearly documented in the WordPress Codex but I, and apparently a lot of other people, missed it.

This is just a note to the three people who used to read this blog. I haven’t updated it in forever because I don’t have the time to write interesting articles at the moment, and I have never been big on the random thought kind of blog.

If you want to know what I’m up to and chat to me follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/m3rls.

I can’t promise anything but I’m hoping to devote a little bit of time to this thing sooner rather than later, but be warned, anything I do post is going to be nerdy.

Thanks, hope you’re all well!

I needed to dump a bunch of stored routines (namely triggers, procedures and functions) from a mysql database, and I didn’t want any of the other junk that mysqldump normlly outputs.

After a bit of searching and fiddling, this is the command I ended up using:

mysqldump filefactory --skip-opt --no-create-info --no-data --routines --triggers -S /data/mysql_5_databases/mysql.sock --password

Newline after -S added by me. Remove it if copying/pasting.

You probably won’t need to specify the socket file and you may not need a password. Just amend the command as necessary to suit your needs.

Enjoy.