Archive for July, 2008

How to Use CHMOD in Kasablanca

Kasablanca is a GUI FTP client, which I regularly use. Today, I needed to change the permissions on a folder to allow writing by the web server. After trying for a long time to do it in kasablanca, I found the solution: At the command-line, write:

$ lftp -u tim ftp.example.com
Password:
lftp tim@ftp.example.com:~> cd the/directory
lftp tim@ftp.example.com:the/directory> chmod 777 the_file

How to Drop All Tables in SQL Dump File

I am currently moving a WordPress blog from one server to another. In the process, I messed up the MySQL database transportation, resulting in some tables being created, and some rows being inserted. It would not be possible to simply run the SQL dump files again, since that would result in duplicate rows. This was easy to fix with some commandline and perl magic, though. The file containing all SQL statements is called wordpress-dump.sql (in this example).

First, find the names of all tables:

$ grep -E '^CREATE TABLE' wordpress-dump.sql
CREATE TABLE `cat_visibility` (
CREATE TABLE `comments` (
CREATE TABLE `links` (
CREATE TABLE `movie_ratings` (
CREATE TABLE `options` (
CREATE TABLE `photopress` (
CREATE TABLE `postmeta` (
CREATE TABLE `posts` (
CREATE TABLE `pp_cats` (
CREATE TABLE `sk2_logs` (
CREATE TABLE `sk2_spams` (
CREATE TABLE `term_relationships` (
CREATE TABLE `term_taxonomy` (
CREATE TABLE `terms` (
CREATE TABLE `usermeta` (
CREATE TABLE `users` (

Next, reformat those lines into DROP queries.

$ grep -E '^CREATE TABLE' wordpress-dump.sql | perl -pe 's/CREATE/DROP/; s/ *\($/;/;'

Now, you won’t have to change those by hand!