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

'clear' command in Cygwin/Terminator

I'm stuck on a Vista box for a desktop gateway to development servers. One of this things I miss is the clear screen command ('clear"). Other users have reported with Cygwin in a cmd window, a ctrl-L clears the screen, but this doesn't work for my environment.

I just installed the ncurses package in Cygwin and now have a working 'clear' command in Cygwin under Terminator.

Using mysql cli client in MAMP

I'm on a new contract and we're using OS X for development. Instead of getting the full LAMP stack for OS X, they use the MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) collection for a one-click solution. http://www.mamp.info

MAMP includes the MySQL GUI tools, but I was wanting to use the command line version of the mysql client. Here's how...

/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysql -uroot -p

(Semi) Secure Wrapper Script for mysqldump

I resurrected this script to do the backup of a client's MySQL database. I run it as a cron job once a day and keep the dump file on a separate server. The MySQL login info is kept in the mysql_access file which I have chmoded to be read-only for me. (chmod 400 mysql_access).

#!/bin/sh

#for debugging
#set -x

TODAY=$(date +"%D - %T")
HOST=$(hostname)
LOGFILE="${HOME}/TFP/logs/backup.log"
SHORTDATE=$(date +"%G%m%d")
DUMPFILE=${HOME}/TFP/dumps/tfp_${SHORTDATE}.sql

source ${HOME}/bin/mysql_access

echo "" >> $LOGFILE
echo "-------------------------------------------" >> $LOGFILE
echo "Date: $TODAY Host:$HOST" >> $LOGFILE
echo "-------------------------------------------" >> $LOGFILE
echo "" >> $LOGFILE

echo "Dumping $MYSQL_DB at $MYSQL_HOST to $DUMPFILE" >> $LOGFILE
mysqldump -h $MYSQL_HOST -u $MYSQL_USER $MYSQL_DB -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD > $DUMPFILE

echo "" >> $LOGFILE
WCSIZE=$(wc $DUMPFILE)
echo "wc for $DUMPFILE is" >> $LOGFILE
echo " $WCSIZE" >> $LOGFILE

echo "" >> $LOGFILE
FILESIZE=$(ls -lh $DUMPFILE)
echo "filesize for $DUMPFILE is" >> $LOGFILE
echo " $FILESIZE" >> $LOGFILE

The contents of the mysql_access include:

MYSQL_USER="some_username"
MYSQL_PASSWORD="password"
MYSQL_HOST="mysql.somedomain.com"
MYSQL_DB="some_database"


My hosting company sends me email with the output of the cron job. I include the size of the dump file in the output so I can just keep a running check on the output in case anything gets out of control.

Comments?