For anyone familiar with the Linux or UNIX command line interface it’s quite likely that grep has crossed your path sometime. grep is a wonderful command line tool that helps you search for a word or words through files. It ships with almost all flavors of Linux by default. For those who aren’t familiar with grep here’s a quick primer. Continued…

The other day I was doing some cleaning on my Linux server and I noticed that over time people had created and left empty files. So I decided to create a shell script that would run through the system and let me know how many files like this existed, along with their path. Continued…

If you run or administer a production MySQL server it’s quite likely that it sometimes runs a little slow, and can be a very time consuming effort to figure out why. To be able to pinpoint the query that slows the DB down can be hard to track down. MySQL has an option to help you out. It comes with an option to log slow queries. This way when you find your database server running slower than usual you can open this log file in a text editor and see what queries are running slow. Let’s look at how to set this up. Continued…