Did you ever want to add a new line to a WordPress entry but it gives you a new paragraph? Instead of this:
– haha
– papa
– mama
You get this:
– haha
– papa
– mama
I hate that. It adds extra space between each line. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. In order to produce the first list without spaces between each line, just hold the shift key while you hit return.
It would be nice if apache told you which module you were missing. Fortunately, there’s the Internets! Hey, this site is on the Internets let’s see if we can help. I just ran ‘service httpd checkconfig’ and received the following error:
# service httpd configtest Syntax error on line 92 of /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf: Invalid command 'Order', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
After a brute force attempt at adding modules, it became clear that I was missing the following module: authz_host_module. I added that in httpd.conf with the following directive:
LoadModule authz_host_module modules/mod_authz_host.so
You can also compile that module into the binary with the following flag: –enable-authz-host (in most cases that’s compiled by default but I’m using RedHate’s binary so it was necessary to add it at run time).
The following pair of functions are ones that I use often. As far as I’m concerned, they should be included in perl. This post serves as both a personal place holder and an opportunity to share with the Internets. Chances are you found them at the sweet end of a Google search.
Method: trim
Params: $string
Return: $str
Usage: $str = trim($str);
# This function trims white space from the
# front and back of parameter $string.
sub trim() {
my $thing = shift;
$thing =~ s/#.*$//; # trim trailing comments
$thing =~ s/^s+//; # trim leading whitespace
$thing =~ s/s+$//; # trim trailing whitespace
return $thing;
}
# Or use this function for perl 5.10 and higher sub trim { (my $s = $_[0]) =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//g; return $s; } |
Php offers a useful utility function called ’empty’ which determines whether or not a variable is, well, empty. Here’s the equivalent function is perl:
Method: empty
Params: $string
Returns: boolean
Usage: if (!empty($string)) { print “Whoo hoo!”; }
sub empty { ! defined $_[0] || ! length $_[0] }
I often use timestamps as unique identifiers or in transaction logging. The Internets are full of perl modules that provide timestamp functionality but I generally prefer to roll my own. Why? Mainly for portability. If a script relies on the basic perl library, then it runs on any server with perl installed.
Method: timestamp
Params: none
Returns: $string
Usage: print timestamp() . “n”;
# returns a string in the following format:
# YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
sub timestamp() {
my $now = time;
my @date = localtime $now;
$date[5] += 1900;
$date[4] += 1;
my $stamp = sprintf(
"%04d%02d%02d%02d%02d",
$date[5],$date[4],$date[3], $date[2], $date[1], $date[0]
);
return $stamp;
}
NOTE: The above function was corrected to include seconds.