Counting Files in a Directory Linux

It's often useful to count how many files are in a folder as a sanity check or as a metric for analysis.  Here is the linux command for counting the number of files (not dotfiles) in a directory: ls -1 /usr/path/2/my/dir/ | wc -l Read More

Saving Linux Program Output Into a File Rather Than Standard Output

When output is really long or if you need t o analyze or search through the output, we will often want to save the output string into a text file.  Here's the syntax: [YOUR COMMAND] > yourFile.txt Here are some examples: ifconfig > ifconfigOutput.txt sudo ls -la /path/to/dir > lsOutput.txt Then you can open the [...] Read More

PostgreSQL Indexes · A Practical Guide With Examples

How To Speed Up Relational Database Tables Our challenge today is speeding up our relational database tables using indices. We downloaded some music data from an online API into Postgresql tables, and our lookup queries are slowing down due to the millions of records When facing scaling pain you always need to evaluate your indexing [...] Read More

Transfering a Folder Recursively to Another Machine With rsync (Push or Pull)

rsync is an awesome program built into Linux to copy files.  It can do both pushing and pulling of files: Pushing Files sudo rsync [OPTION...] [USER@]HOST:SRC... [DEST] Example of Pushing a Directory Recursively: sudo rsync -rt /var/www/html/coolFiles timmanz@192.168.1.86:/home/mydir/InterestingStuff Pulling Files You can also initiate the transfer on the receiving machine.  The syntax is as follows: [...] Read More

Migrating From MySQL to PostgreSQL Using pgloader

This tutorial shows how to migrate your mysql database to postgresql.  Let's imagine we are migrating a table called MusicData to PostgreSql from mysql sudo mysqldump --compatible=postgresql --default-character-set=utf8 -r MusicData.mysql -u root -p MusicData sudo wget https://raw.github.com/lanyrd/mysql-postgresql-converter/master/db_converter.py sudo chmod +rx db_converter.py sudo python db_converter.py MusicData.mysql MusicData.psql Install PostgreSQL if you don't have it installed yet: sudo apt-get [...] Read More

Enable NGINX to Allow Larger Uploads

Many times we'll set up a new media server and will need to allow larger files to be uploaded.  This is also useful when running a WordPress site with NGINX sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf Look for a setting called client_max_body_size and update it to a marge larger number, I like 8000M.  If there is no client_max_body_size setting, add [...] Read More

Linux Hard Drive Guide

Hard drives allow us to store large amounts of data in a predictable, uniform way.  No matter which manufacturer produces the hard drive, Linux abstracts this away from the computer's user so they can easily use the available space. Storage is reaching amazing low prices and you can get a great 1TB hard drive for $46.88 [...] Read More

Zipping an Entire Directory on Linux

It's easy to zip up a folder in Linux which will save you a lot of time transferring lots of files between machines: sudo zip -r /home/tom/myData.zip /home/tom/MyDataFolder/* If the machine does not have the zip application installed, you can add it easily with the following command: sudo apt install zip unzip Read More

Copy PostgreSQL Database to Another Machine

Whether migrating to another database or server, there are a couple of ways to bring along your PostgreSQL database data. On the first server that already has the data, we will want to get our data and COPY TO a text file: pg_dump "MyDataBase" > /path/to/export/file.sql Then we move the data file to the second server that [...] Read More

Modifying Crontab With Nano When Another Editor Set as Default

The Problem Ever get to a client's linux server and try to edit or modify a cron job, only to run sudo crontab -e and realize there is so insane text editor set to the default.  This guide will help you open the text file with the ever helpful nano program   The Solution sudo env [...] Read More