I had a bit of an issue with an Ubuntu box used for digital signage where I need the machine to come up after a restart, automatically log in a user, then launch a full screen web page in Chrome. I initially added a shell script which launched Chrome as part of the user session. Unfortunately, this did not allow enough time for a network connection to be made.  I tried adding a sleep 20 to the script but all…

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There’s probably a far better way of managing your Subversion working copies but I find this command is very useful. I often diff two directories with the diff -wbur command This produces a lot of output if there are many changes (pages of it). To limit the output to the lines in the output which point out the changed files I would do: diff -wbur /var/www/moodleupgrade/mod/vqpack/ svntrunks/moodle3modstrunk/mod/vqpack/ | grep diff This produces an output like : diff -wbur /var/www/moodleupgrade/mod/vqpack/view.php svntrunks/moodle3modstrunk/mod/vqpack/view.php…

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I have renamed a Moodle module I’m writing from mod_dumgalinduction to mod_dumgalchecklist because it seems to have more use beyond the original idea (move the student induction checklist off the paper form). To search and replace all of the text within the php files is quite easy: I renamed the lang file from dumgalinduction.php to dumgalchecklist.php manually. I always get in a muddle changing the names of the files in the backup folder so I used this rename command to…

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I need to append the contents of a text file to a string in php line by line. awk and sed are very useful for such things. Here is the content of the file. It’s a fairly standard bit of bootstrap HTML. I need to replace all of the ” characters with ‘, then start each line with $string.=” and end each line with \n”; Cat divs.txt simply prints the content of the file. This is piped into the sed…

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I often have more than one zip file in a directory to unzip – usually Moodle modules or the like. e.g. To unzip all of the mods into their respective folders in one line:  

It’s really inconvenient to continually enter your password when ssh’ing among internal servers. Especially if your password is long. I have set up password-less login on some of our linux servers using this excellent guide. I had already set up a private/public key pair on my mac in the .ssh folder in my /Users/ folder: It’s necessary to send your public key to the server you intend to log into. The provided command does not work because the hidden directory…

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I have recently encountered a problem loading BLOBs from SQL server 2012. Until moving to PHP 7.x we previously used the mssql libraries. Now we are using the dblib driver in PDO the php_mssql libraries are gone for good. It appeared that, once again, files were being truncated to 60Kb (an old problem). It’s not clear why this started to break again. No new packages have been installed. Using php_mssql it was possible to: These ini_set statements don’t have any…

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In packaging our learning analytics automation system I have provided test data in CSV files on the Virtualbox machine. These CSV files contained actual student ID numbers from our College so I needed to replace them with random, non-repeating information. I have substituted these with Student(n) to represent the real students for this post. I found an excellent AWK entry on the evergreen Stack Overflow which fit my particular use case. This is very close to what I need to…

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