bash

Back in November last year, I wrote a script which handled backing up a drupal database. There were quite a few comments and I've taken some on board and developed the script on a little further to be more "generic".

One of the main complaints/suggestions about my previous snippet was the hard coded nature of it. The follow script offers far more configuration through the command line itself.

I was just dumping a database using mysqldump and I noticed that tables such as cache (and its cousins cache_page, cache_menu, etc), sessions and watchdog can be pretty big and are also not often essential for backing up. I mean, when you restore your web site do you really care about restoring people's logged in sessions from when the backup took place? I can understand maybe keeping watchdog; but then again should you lose your site you would probably lose it several hours after the backup so would miss out on any relevant watchdog notices.

Anywho… I did a mysqdump for a large database for a website I maintain and the dump came out at 400Mb. I then spent a few minutes cobling together a small script which would do a mysqldump but had some pre-programmed Regular Expressions to match specific groups of tables which it would only dump the structure for (ie, no data). After running this script, the SQL dump was only 220Mb. Much better! It also runs considerable quicker too and will cause less table locking.

So - the script?

This afternoon I needed to rename a bunch of files from one form to another in a command shell… Well technically I didn't need to do it in a shell - but, as sure as there is a hole in my ass, I wasn't gonna go through renaming them all manually!

They needed to go from, for example, add.png to add_32.png. After a little research into commands like printf, awk, bison and so on - I suddenly realized that 'cut' held the key!