Category Archives: Linux System

Quick tip: how do you rename all files so spaces are converted to underscores?

My friend today asked me how to convert all spaces in filenames under a specified directory to underscores. Also, at the same time lowercase all of the filenames. Here is a quick script to do what is needed. Let us start with creating some test data in a temp directory:

mkdir temp
cd temp
touch Foo FooO "Foo Bar" "FOO BAaR"
\ls | while read -r FILENAME
do
mv -v "$FILENAME" `echo $FILENAME| tr ' ' '_'| tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
done

Note:  I intentionally have slash in front of ls (\ls).  \ls means that we want to make sure there is no ls alias overwriting our command. This is needed if your system has alias setup to display ls in a different way instead of default listing.  mv -v shows us the filenames being renamed as your script goes through the whole dir.  Your output should be like:

`Foo' -> `foo'
`FOO BAaR' -> `foo_baar'
`Foo Bar' -> `foo_bar'
`FooO' -> `fooo'

One of the very powerful commands in this post is the “tr” command. This command is not as popular as sed or awk but it is very useful and simple to use (read more about tr).

If you only needed to convert spaces to underscores and you are using CentOS/Fedora/Redhat, you can use this simpler method. NOTE: this command is not available on all distributions: rename " " "_" *

Learn more about rename command
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DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.

Apache/http monitoring: monitor http traffic in realtime using httptop

Server monitoring is a big part of running a solid web site.  As an admin, you must know what is going on your server.  One of the tools most Linux/Unix admins are used to is called “top”.  “top” by itself is a very powerful tool.  Here is a quick guide on how to read output from top:  introduction to load averages under top.  It just makes sense that somebody went and created httptop to monitor http traffic.

Install perl modules:

install Term::ReadKey
install File::Tail
install Time::HiRes

Now copy paste the script below and save it in a location and set +x attribute on it so you can execute it.  On my setup, I have the script under /usr/bin/httptop:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Time::HiRes qw( time );
use File::Tail (  );
use Term::ReadKey;
use Getopt::Std;
use strict;
### Defaults you might be interested in adjusting.
my $Update = 2; # update every n secs
my $Backtrack = 250; # backtrack n lines on startup
my @Paths = qw(
%
/title/%/logs/access_log
/var/log/httpd/%/access_log
/usr/local/apache/logs/%/access_log
);
my $Log_Format = "combined";
my %Log_Fields = (
combined => [qw/ Host x x Time URI Response x Referer Client /],
vhost => [qw/ VHost Host x x Time URI Response x Referer Client /]
);
### Constants & other thingies. Nothing to see here. Move along.
my $Version = "0.4.1";
sub by_hits_per (  ) { $b->{Rate} <=> $a->{Rate} }
sub by_total (  ) { $b->{Total} <=> $a->{Total} }
sub by_age (  ) { $a->{Last} <=> $b->{Last} }
my $last_field = "Client";
my $index = "Host";
my $show_help = 0;
my $order = \&by_hits_per;
my $Help = "htlwufd?q";
my %Keys = (
h => [ "Order by hits/second" => sub { $order = \&by_hits_per } ],
t => [ "Order by total recorded hits" => sub { $order = \&by_total } ],
l => [ "Order by most recent hits" => sub { $order = \&by_age } ],
w => [ "Show remote host" => sub { $index = "Host" } ],
u => [ "Show requested URI" => sub { $index = "URI" } ],
f => [ "Show referring URL" => sub { $index = "Referer" } ],
d => [ "Show referring domain" => sub { $index = "Domain" } ],
'?' => [ "Help (this thing here)" => sub { $show_help++ } ],
q => [ "Quit" => sub { exit } ]
);
my @Display_Fields = qw/ Host Date URI Response Client Referer Domain /;
my @Record_Fields = qw/ Host URI Referer Domain /;
my $Max_Index_Width = 50;
my $Initial_TTL = 50;
my @Months = qw/ Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Nov Dec /;
my %Term = (
HOME => "\033[H",
CLS => "\033[2J",
START_TITLE => "\033]0;", # for xterms etc.
END_TITLE => "\007",
START_RV => "\033[7m",
END_RV => "\033[m"
);
my ( %hist, %opt, $spec );
$SIG{INT} = sub { exit };
END { ReadMode 0 };
### Subs.
sub refresh_output
{
my ( $cols, $rows ) = GetTerminalSize;
my $show = $rows - 3;
my $count = $show;
my $now = (shift || time);
for my $type ( values %hist ) {
for my $peer ( values %$type ) {
# if ( --$peer->{_Ttl} > 0 ) {
my $delta = $now - $peer->{Start};
if ( $delta >= 1 ) {
$peer->{ Rate } = $peer->{ Total } / $delta;
} else {
$peer->{ Rate } = 0
}
$peer->{ Last } = int( $now - $peer->{ Date } );
# } else {
# delete $type->{$peer}
# }
}
}
$count = scalar( values %{$hist{$index}} ) - 1 if $show >= scalar values %{$hist{$index}};
my @list = ( sort $order values %{$hist{$index}} )[ 0 .. $count ];
my $first = 0;
$first = ( $first <= $_ ? $_ + 1 : $first ) for map { $_ ? length($_->{$index}) : 0 } @list;
$first = $Max_Index_Width if $Max_Index_Width < $first;
print $Term{START_TITLE}, "Monitoring $spec at: ", scalar localtime, $Term{END_TITLE} if $ENV{TERM} eq "xterm"; # UGLY!!!
my $help = "Help/?";
my $head = sprintf( "%-${first}s %6s %4s %4s %s (%d total)",
$index, qw{ Hits/s Tot Last }, $last_field,
scalar keys %{$hist{$index}}
);
#
# Truncate status line if need be
#
$head = substr($head, 0, ($cols - length($help)));
print @Term{"HOME", "START_RV"}, $head, " " x ($cols - length($head) - length($help)), $help, $Term{END_RV}, "\n";
for ( @list ) {
# $_->{_Ttl}++;
my $line = sprintf( "%-${first}s %6.3f %4d %3d %s",
substr( $_->{$index}, 0, $Max_Index_Width ), @$_{(qw{ Rate Total Last }, $last_field)} );
if ( length($line) > $cols ) {
substr( $line, $cols - 1 ) = "";
} else {
$line .= " " x ($cols - length($line));
}
print $line, "\n";
}
print " " x $cols, "\n" while $count++ < $show;
}
sub process_line
{
my $line = shift;
my $now = ( shift || time );
my %hit;
chomp $line;
@hit{@{$Log_Fields{$Log_Format}}} = grep( $_, split( /"([^"]+)"|\[([^]]+)\]|\s/o, $line ) );
$hit{ URI } =~ s/HTTP\/1\S+//gos;
$hit{ Referer } = "<unknown>" if not $hit{Referer} or $hit{Referer} eq "-";
( $hit{Domain} = $hit{Referer} ) =~ s#^\w+://([^/]+).*$#$1#os;
$hit{ Client } ||= "<none>";
$hit{ Client } =~ s/Mozilla\/[\w.]+ \(compatible; /(/gos;
$hit{ Client } =~ s/[^\x20-\x7f]//gos;
# if $now is negative, try to guess how old the hit is based on the time stamp.
if ( $now < 0 ) {
my @hit_t = ( split( m![:/\s]!o, $hit{ Time } ))[ 0 .. 5 ];
my @now_t = ( localtime )[ 3, 4, 5, 2, 1, 0 ];
my @mag = ( 3600, 60, 1 );
# If the hit didn't parse right, or didn't happen today, the hell with it.
return unless $hit_t[2] == ( $now_t[2] + 1900 )
and $hit_t[1] eq $Months[ $now_t[1] ]
and $hit_t[0] == $now_t[0];
splice( @hit_t, 0, 3 );
splice( @now_t, 0, 3 );
# Work backward to the UNIX time of the hit.
$now = time;
$now -= (shift( @now_t ) - shift( @hit_t )) * $_ for ( 3600, 60, 1 );
}
$hit{ Date } = $now;
for my $field ( @Record_Fields ) {
my $peer = ( $hist{$field}{$hit{$field}} ||= { Start => $now, _Ttl => $Initial_TTL } );
@$peer{ @Display_Fields } = @hit{ @Display_Fields };
$peer->{ Total }++;
}
}
sub display_help {
my $msg = "httptop v.$Version";
print @Term{qw/ HOME CLS START_RV /}, $msg, $Term{END_RV}, "\n\n";
print " " x 4, $_, " " x 8, $Keys{$_}[0], "\n" for ( split "", $Help );
print "\nPress any key to continue.\n";
}
### Init.
getopt( 'frb' => \%opt );
$Backtrack = $opt{b} if $opt{b};
$Update = $opt{r} if $opt{r};
$Log_Format = $opt{f} if $opt{f};
$spec = $ARGV[0];
die <<End unless $spec and $Log_Fields{$Log_Format};
Usage: $0 [-f <format>] [-r <refresh_secs>] [-b <backtrack_lines>] <logdir | path_to_log>
Valid formats are: @{[ join ", ", keys %Log_Fields ]}.
End
for ( @Paths ) {
last if -r $spec;
( $spec = $_ ) =~ s/%/$ARGV[0]/gos;
}
die "No access_log $ARGV[0] found.\n" unless -r $spec;
my $file = File::Tail->new(
name => $spec,
interval => $Update / 2,
maxinterval => $Update,
tail => $Backtrack,
nowait => 1
) or die "$spec: $!";
my $last_update = time;
my ( $line, $now );
# Backtracking.
while ( $Backtrack-- > 0 ) {
last unless $line = $file->read;
process_line( $line, -1 );
}
$file->nowait( 0 );
ReadMode 4; # Echo off.
print @Term{"HOME", "CLS"}; # Home & clear.
refresh_output;
### Main loop.
while (defined( $line = $file->read )) {
$now = time;
process_line( $line, $now );
while ( $line = lc ReadKey(-1) ) {
$show_help = 0 if $show_help;
$Keys{$line}[1]->(  ) if $Keys{$line};
}
if ( $show_help == 1 ) {
display_help;
$show_help++; # Don't display help again.
} elsif ( $now - $last_update > $Update and not $show_help ) {
$last_update = $now;
refresh_output( $now );
}
}

Save/exit and make sure you make it executable by setting it to +x (chmod +x httptop)

Now you can run httptop by typing:  httptop -f combined -r 1 /usr/local/apache2/logs/access_log

NOTE:  Your access_log file might be in different location.  Point to the right location.  This sets the refresh rate to 1 sec (-r 1).  Now you can run httptop any time you want to checkout how your http traffic is doing.  Remember to press “?” to get help once you are in.

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DISCLAIMER: As always, if you find any inaccurate information, please comment and let me know. When you do comment, make sure you give me some references to confirm.

MySQL: How do you enable sphinxse (Sphinx Storage Engine) in your mysql installation?

As you may know mysql fulltext search is not highly scalable.  One of the options to get around this scalability limitation, which I prefer, is to use Sphinx.  You can use Sphinx with out having to alter your mysql installation.  But, if you would like to use from within mysql and not have to worry about how to pass data between Sphinx and MySQL, you can enable sphinxse (sphinx storage engine).  It is not included with mysql by default so you will have to compile it yourself.

Here are the instructions on how to get sphinxse compiled with your mysql installation on CentOS x64.  I am sure same instructions will work for other flavors but I have not tested it.  I will be compiling the most current version of sphinx (0.9.8) with most current stable version of mysql (5.0.51b) at the time of the writing.  Let’s get the appropriate packages first:

wget http://www.sphinxsearch.com/downloads/sphinx-0.9.8.tar.gz
wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/mysql-5.0.51b.tar.gz/from/http://mysql.he.net/
tar zxpf sphinx*
tar zxpf mysql*

You will also need “bison”, “patch”, “automake” and “libtool” installed.  Let us just do a yum install for it.

yum -y install bison patch automake libtool

NOTE:  if you don’t install bison, you will get the following error:
sed '/^#/ s|y\.tab\.c|sql_yacc.cc|' y.tab.c >sql_yacc.cct && mv sql_yacc.cct sql_yacc.cc
sed: can't read y.tab.c: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [sql_yacc.cc] Error 2

Let us continue with patching mysql source with sphinx storage engine (sphinxse) code and compile/install our new binaries.

cd mysql*
patch -p1 < ../sphinx-0.9.8/mysqlse/sphinx.5.0.37.diff #Make sure everything succeeded.
BUILD/autorun.sh
mkdir sql/sphinx
cp ../sphinx-0.9.8/mysqlse/* sql/sphinx
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --with-sphinx-storage-engine
make
make install

Now start your mysql installtion and check if engine support is compiled in:

mysql> show engines\G
Engine: SPHINX
Support: YES
Comment: Sphinx storage engine 0.9.8

To read more about how to use Sphinx storage engine, please refer to:  Sphinx documentation for using sphinx storage engine

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DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.

Linux: yum options you may not know exist.

Most of the users who work with distributions such as: centos, fedora, redhat, etc use yum as a package update/installer. Most of them know how to do “yum update [packagename]” (to update all or [certain packages]) or they do “yum install packagename” to install certain package(s). But yum can do so much more. Here are some options you may find useful:

Following command will search for the string you specified. Generally this will give you all of the packages which has specified string in title or description. Most of the time you will have to look through a lot of output to find what you are looking for.

yum search string

Probably one of the most important options for yum is provides/whatprovides. If you know what command you need, you can find out what package you have to install in order to have that command available to you.

yum provides (or whatprovides) command

Following command is same as above but with less output.

yum -d 1 provides command

So for example if you are trying to figure out what you need to install to use bunzip2, type:

yum -d 1 provides bunzip2

you will get a similar output as below.

# yum -d 1 provides bunzip2
bzip2.x86_64 1.0.2-13.EL4.3 base
bzip2.x86_64 1.0.2-13.EL4.3 base
man-pages-fr.noarch 0.9.7-13.el4 base
man-pages-ja.noarch 20050215-2.EL4.3 base
man-pages-pl.noarch 0.23-5 base

As you can see bunzip2 is part of bzip2 package. So now you can you just install bzip2.x86_64 to get bunzip2.

To learn more about what else is available, read man yum.

Apache2 gzip compression: How do I speed up my website download time?

One of the things people tend to forget is the ability for web servers to compress content before sending it back to client. Client’s browser then uncompresses the data and displays it to the user. Pretty much all of the recent browsers support gzip compression. In this post, I will go over how to setup apache2 to use compression. First let’s see if your Apache installation has “deflate” enabled. You can check to see if you have deflate by typing:

# /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -t -D DUMP_MODULES
Loaded Modules:
...
deflate_module (static)
...
Syntax OK

If you don’t have have deflate_module, you would have to recompile your apache with “–enable-deflate” option.

Going forward, I am going to assume you have deflate_module. Add the following to your apache conf file:

<Location />
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip\
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
</Location>

The main thing you need to configure is the line which says “no-gzip dont-vary” also in bold above. This tells apache to not compress certain type of files. I have noticed on some of my sites that swf (flash) files do not work as expected if they are compressed. So if you have swf files in your site, you may want to add |swf right after png.

This is all what it takes for you to enable gzip compression in Apache2. Once you restart your apache so it reads the conf file, you can test if your site is getting compressed or not by using this tool: http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

Here are the results for my blog:

Results for: http://crazytoon.com
Web page compressed? Yes
Compression type? gzip
Size, Markup (bytes) 57,337
Size, Compressed (bytes) 11,666
Compression % 79.7

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DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.