Shell script to clean up a project directory

If you want to manually check if e-mail delivery works on a machine by sending an e-mail you can run the following:
mail -s Test someone@example.com < /dev/null

This will send an empty e-mail with "Test" as its subject to `someone@example.com...

I prefer the application that I'm currently working on to be reachable at http://localhost/.

So when I switch to another project, I use this handy shell script to set one site as the current one. Call it just like this:
apache-site makandra...

Grep prints one line per match. To return the number if matches, use the -c switch:

grep -c "something" filename

However, if a word appears more than once in a line, it is only counted once.

To count every match, you can use [sed](http:...

We regularly need to connect to the server in order to e.g. access the production console. Guessing the Capistrano deploy user and then again guessing the right directory on the server is awkward, so we wrote a script that parses config/deploy and...

$RANDOM on bash returns a random integer between 0 and 32767.

echo $RANDOM
9816
echo $RANDOM
30922

If you want to limit that to a certain maximum, you can just compare against the modulus of that maximum + 1. \
For example, the fo...

When using the screen tool you may be unable to start a screen session but instead encounter an error:

Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/0' - please check.

This is because another user (you) initiated the current terminal -- you probably...

Soon after having written our shell-for script, we wanted to easily get dumps of our productions machines, too. This is how we do it:

dum...

In shell scripts you can use $1 to refer to the first argument, $2 for the second, etc. If you want to refer to all arguments (e.g. when writing a bash script that takes an arbitrary amount of arguments and passes them on to another call), you...

Let's say you have a folder images and want to to move all files in there to a new subfolder public.

cd images
mkdir public
mv !(public) public

The !(public) excludes the new subfolder itself from being moved.