Tag Archives: bash

GoDaddy’s php.ini and .htaccess for parsing .xml files

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The title says it all, doesn’t it? I’ve read plenty of web articles on this, and they’re all variants of the same thing. In a nutshell, you need to create a local php.ini file and a .htaccess file. The specific file names and their respective entries will vary slightly depending on what version of PHP your hosting account is using. (There are more than 2; Some accounts use both 4 and 5.)

My hosting account runs PHP5, primarily. My .htaccess file has the entry below. Note that it doesn’t have the -cgi (as in: AddHandler x-httpd-php5-cgi) suffix.
AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .xml

My php.ini, php4.ini, and php5.ini files (yes, I have all 3) include this single line:
short_open_tag = “0″

Now files with the .xml extension will be parsed by the PHP interpreter. You’ll need to remember to manually set the content-type header of your files if they’re not HTML. In my case, I had to set the content type header to text/xml.

I had a lot of files to add the line to, plus I wanted to gzip them, so the following command came in handy: (It should all be on one line.)

find *.pdf.xml -type f -exec sed -i '1i <?php  /*Some PHP Stuff*/ ?>' {} \;

Automate FTP with Bash (on Mac OS X)

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Save the code below in a file with a .sh extension, as in ftp.sh. From the command line, remember to chmod +x it so that it’s executable. Set the file to open with terminal.app. Finally, configure terminal.app to automatically close windows after a script has run. Once those steps are complete, you should be able to just double-click your file and have it FTP your stuff “automatically”. 

#!/bin/bash

ftp -inv ftp.yoursite.com<<ENDFTP
user username password
cd xml
bin
lcd ~/Desktop
put "somefile.txt"
bye
ENDFTP

#Trash it
cd ~/Desktop
mv somefile.txt ~/.trash

Automating a Process – Part 1: Sudo Operations

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This series picks up where my Batch post left off. We’re going to look at a few tools, one by one, and move toward a comprehensive solution to automate a process. We’ll use batch, perl, bash, and more.

OK, let’s get started.

Whether a system is remote or not is, of course, not our primary concern, but the technique used here can be leveraged in client-server network operations like SSH. Here is the situation: we need to perform basic *nix shell (bash) commands in an environment that requires sudo.

Imagine you have a private user area on a corporate hosting box. And imagine that you can’t perform any operations outside of your user area – like copying edited files into directories that are controlled by the server – without using sudo. Wow, major efficiency killer. That means every time you want to edit your print.css file, for example, you have issue a sudo command to either copy one into your hosting root or to open an editor.

Here is how you use perl to issue a sudo command without having to manually enter a password 

#!/usr/bin/perl

#SUDO PASSWORD
$pass = 'YOUR_PASSWORD';

#LS the files in the DEPLOY directory
$cmd  = "echo '$pass' | sudo -S ls -l ";
$cmdStdout = `$cmd`;

print $cmdStdout;

exit;

The magic is in the echo $pass | (“echo pass pipe”), which is followed by whatever sudo command you were going to enter. The first two variables, $pass and $cmd, are just strings. $cmd will interpolate $pass so that the full string inside of $cmd is equal to: 

$cmd  = "echo YOUR_PASSWORD | sudo -S ls -l ";

The final variable captures the output of the command. The back ticks tell perl to use the string $cmd as a command and run it.

Perl works nicely on *nix boxes. You can accomplish the same with shell scripting, but by bringing perl into the mix, we acquire its huge array of other capabilities.