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From time to time, I find some settings for vi on remote systems that really kind of freak me out. The one I found recently was ‘incsearch’ so I decided to use this opportunity to note down the settings I use on a daily basis. Hope you find some of these useful.


syntax on  
set hlsearch
set incsearch
set ruler
set showmatch


syntax on is pretty obvious. If you’re writing code, it’s pretty smart about highlighting the code so it’s easier to read. It can be odd at first but I find it really useful and after a while, it becomes second nature.

set hlsearch highlights your search terms so they’re easy to see. I like this option a lot. not everyone does.

set incsearch searches as you type. It’s new to me so I’m still getting used to it but I think I can already see some uses for it.

set ruler shows you where your cursor is at all times. I like this option a lot if only to tell me what line number I’m on. set number will also do this but I also find it irritating because it also interferes with my copy/paste habits.

set showmatch is really useful if you’re a coder. If you’ve got somewhat complicated conditional statements or loops, this feature will show you where brackets match so you can find missing brackets and close the proper blocks.

Hope these help. I’ll update these as I find more.

I always find these commands handy when working with apache.

Part of any VirtualHost config involves making the right directories and you can make your job easier by using curly braces. I suppose you could call it regular expressions. I don’t actually know the technical terms for it. I know it works in bash which is what I use on a daily basis.

Learn how to create directories without having to issue multiple mkdir commands. This is a pretty simple one.

mkdir -p /path/to/some/vhost/docs

This is fairly straight forward. Make the parent directories if they don’t exist. So if /path/to/some/vhost/docs is what you want, and /path or any of it’s children don’t exist, then it will get created. It’s a fairly safe command because it intelligently checks before creating directories.

This example is a bit more complicated but it’s awesomeness will blow you away. I used this when I was making virtualhosts for multiple domains or even sub domains of the same parent.

mkdir -p {sub1,sub2,sub3}.domain.com/{docs,logs,cgi-bin}

or

mkdir -p www.{domain1,domain2,domain3}.com/{docs,logs,cgi-bin}

that command will create all your directories in the appropriate hierarchy so that you don’t need to issue multiple mkdir commands. It will create the parent directories for you as well. Here is what it does.

$ find .
.
./www.domain1.com
./www.domain1.com/cgi-bin
./www.domain1.com/docs
./www.domain1.com/logs
./www.domain2.com
./www.domain2.com/cgi-bin
./www.domain2.com/docs
./www.domain2.com/logs
./www.domain3.com
./www.domain3.com/cgi-bin
./www.domain3.com/docs
./www.domain3.com/logs

You can also do that with ls.

$ ls -d www.domain{1,2}*
www.domain1.com    www.domain2.com

Or even with rm

$ rm -vr www.domain{1,3}*
www.domain1.com/cgi-bin
www.domain1.com/docs
www.domain1.com/logs
www.domain1.com
www.domain3.com/cgi-bin
www.domain3.com/docs
www.domain3.com/logs
www.domain3.com

Enjoy!

I love find

There is no other way to put it. It’s such a fantastic tool and once you get used to it, you almost never use the sub par “locate” utility to find files.

Some of my favorite find switches and one liners are listed below. Explanations too.

Find all directories in the current directory only without going any deeper that start with “20″. Note that I have included ‘-mindepth 1′ and there is a reason for that. Try excluding it and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

find ./ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -name "20*"


Find all files named config.php in this directory and all sub directories. Print the name of the file and run ‘ls -al’ on the file. run a grep command for “string1″ (case insensitive) against the files. I find this command very useful in doing a single replacement across many files. It helps me determine what will change if I run a mass replacement. The “{}” at the end is the name of the file that is replaced in the command. Without that, you will get an error.

find ./ -name "config.php" -ls -print -exec grep -i string1 {} \;


Now I can find those same files and then run a sed command that will replace all occurrences of string1 with string2. The “-i” in this case tells sed to make the change to the file in place without creating a new file. This way you have less to clean up but be careful because there is no backup. If you want to backup the file, use “-i” where is the extension you want the backup file to have. E.g. -i.bak

find ./ -name "config.php" -exec sed -i "s/string1/string2/g" {} \;

Another use of exec where you sub {} for the file name allows you to do cool things like back up many different files with the same condition. In this case, anything that is “config.*” will be “config.*.bak”.

find ./-name "config.*" - exec cp {} {}.bak \;

Find any directories that have a no permissions for group and others. This is important if you want to find directories that don’t have permissions that are needed for users to enter a directory. After this, you can use -exec chmod 755 {} \; to change the permissions appropriately.

find ./ -type d -perm 0700


Find any files that are owned by a particular user. You can also specify “-group” to find files by user and group names. I use this to find files owned by “root” in home directories and then chown them to the appropriate user.

find ./ -user "username"


The -exec feature in find is perhaps the most valuable aspect of “find”. I use it several times a day in combination with sed and awk to do all sorts of one liners that would normally need a script.

Don’t forget that you can do all sorts of really neat things with find, sed, awk if you use regular expressions.