my two cents

iPhone app for Public transit in San Francisco

pshah — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 04:49:45 +0000

I am new to San Francisco and have been using this really cool app called Transporter to find my way through the city. I learned that it is designed by two UC Berkeley students: Ljuba Miljkovic and Thejo Kote.

Apps like these make me pay $30/month for the iphone data plan. Totally worth it

Great job guys!

The power of less

pshah — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:33:37 +0000

Goal: I want to find some text called mytext within all php files in a directory. I also want to display all the matches and highlight them.
If this is what you want try this:

grep -Hin "mytext" *.php | less +/mytext

find php syntax errors

pshah — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:19:32 +0000

To find syntax errors in all php pages within a directory called /var/www/html, use the following command:

find /var/www/html -name '*.php' -type f -exec php -l {} \;

Sphinx search

pshah — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:21:48 +0000

Have a big website with millions of records? Is MySQL full-text search letting you down? Sphinx search http://sphinxsearch.com by Andrew Aksyonoff is probably gonna solve your problems. It is an awesome product (and yes it’s open source) with less than a second search results on a data set with millions of records.
I had the opportunity to author a sphinx based search engine for vBulletin. We use it for our huge forums at Internet Brands. A demo can be viewed here:

Honda-tech.com (35+ million records)
CorvetteForum
FlyerTalk

use watch command to WATCH :)

pshah — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:23:46 +0000

From the man watch page: “The -d or --differences flag will highlight the differences between successive updates.”
Try

watch -d -n 3 "free -m"

The above command would highlight the differences in memory consumption every 3 seconds.

slicehost vs rackspacecloud

pshah — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:12:52 +0000

I tried a 256 MB slice (that’s what they call a cloud) with Slicehost, a rackspace company, and the guys are AWESOME! Shortly after that, rackspace came up with rackspacecloud.com (they had slicehost, why would they? who cares ), and I have been a big big fan of rackspace. So, I decided to give rackspacecloud.com a shot. Same memory, same disk space, same everything (well I haven’t really needed rackspacecloud.com support that often) and close to half the price.

256 MB on slicehost = $20 vs 256 MB on rackspacecloud.com = $11 approximately (for me atleast)

Doesn’t quite make sense to me

How to duplicate a file with the current date and time

pshah — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:43:08 +0000

To duplicate (backup) a file as filename.unixtimestamp use

cp myfilename{,.`date +%s`}

You can change the date format as per your preference. Below would duplicate it as filename.yyyymmdd

cp myfilename{,.`date +%Y%m%d`}

To find all files modified after a certain date and time

pshah — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:24:16 +0000

To find all files (regular files) modified after 12:00 AM today use

touch -t `date +%Y%m%d0000` /tmp/mintimestamp
find /path/to/search/for -type f -newer /tmp/mintimestamp
rm /tmp/mintimestamp

The trick is to timestamp /tmp/mintimestamp with the timestamp that we want to compare against.

So you would use the touch command below in the above set of commands to find all files modified after 12:00 AM on Jan 1, 2008:

touch -t `date 200801010000` /tmp/mintimestamp

Migrating website content is quick and easy

pshah — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:31:02 +0000

Check out my post on migrating website content here: http://priteshjshah.com/?page_id=42

find everything except something using grep

pshah — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:35:02 +0000

the -v switch is used to return negative results. So, to find everything which does not contain “findme” use

cat filename | grep -v "findme"