Preserving a leading zero on a number in a text field in Excel

At work we're writing UPC codes to a TSV file. Often a UPC has a leading zero, which is automatically whacked when the file is opened in Excel. The trick is to write the UPC cell to the TSV file as

="027297909021"

This preserves the zero.

OMG, command line editing in mysql client

This is freaking awesome. To enable command line editing and searching in the mysql client, create ~/.inputrc and add the following lines...

set keymap vi

set editing-mode vi

Bam, vi commands in the shell. This is literally shaving hours off my work time.

Perl Module Tricks

To check the existence of a module, if the following completes with no errors, it's installed...

perl -MXML::Simple -e 1

To get the version of a module...

perl -MXML::Simple -e 'print "$XML::Simple::VERSION\n"'

Removing a CVS sticky tag

Yes, I'm sorry to say, I still have to use CVS for some tasks. We've talked about upgrading to SVN, at least, but I doubt it will happen soon. To remove a sticky tag and update a file to the latest revision (HEAD), use the following...

cvs update -A filename