The Linux Cookbook

Tips and Techniques for Everyday Use by Michael Stutz. This free book presents "recipes" for preparing or accomplishing a particular, specific thing. The author has selected what he considers to be the easiest and most effective methods for accomplishing particular tasks, and have arranged these recipes in general sections according to subject matter.

The layout is very simple and the book is an excellent resource for daily linux use.

Become a shell script expert !

The Unix shell is the main scripting environment of every Linux, Mac OS X and Unix system, whether a rescued laptop or a million-dollar mainframe. This cookbook of useful, customizable, and fun scripts gives you the tools to solve common Linux, Mac OS X and Unix problems and personalize your computing environment. Among the more than 100 scripts included are an interactive calculator, a spell checker, a disk backup utility, a weather tracker, and a web logfile analysis tool. The book also teaches you how to write your own sophisticated shell scripts by explaining the syntax and techniques used to build each example scripts. Examples are written in Bourne Shell (sh) syntax.

Quick E-Commerce with PHP and PayPal

Author: Peter Lavin

This article gives a great insight into developing a small website that incorporates your own shopping cart or a third-party cart in conjunction with PayPal.

Finding a secure method of payment can be a problem for small businesses without merchant credit card accounts or access to a secure server. This article concerns creating an e-commerce site using your own shopping cart or a third-party cart in conjunction with PayPal. This solution will maximise the business benefits and minimise the inconvenience to the customer. A database and server-side scripting will be implemented using MySQL and PHP. Some knowledge of these technologies and of HTML is assumed.

Redirect browser to use SSL

You can redirect browser to use SSL secure port using .htaccess file with Rewrite Rules.

Create a .htaccess file with the below Rewrite rule.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !=443
RewriteRule ^ https://secure.yourdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [NS,R,L]

Server Environment Variables

One of the methods that the web server uses to pass information to a cgi script is through environmental variables. These are created and assigned appropriate values within the environment that the server spawns for the cgi script. They can be accessed as any other environmental variable, like with %ENV{'VARIABLE_NAME'} (in Perl). Many of them, contain important information, that most cgi programs need to take into account.

To get a list of such environment variables, use the below script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
foreach $value(keys %ENV) {
  print "$value: $ENV{$value}\n";
}
exit;

The Power of Find !!

find is one of the most usefull and important utilities any *NIX has. We will try to demonstrate you with some find basics.

find begins at a specified point on a directory tree and searches all lower branches for files that match a given set of parameters.

$ find path operators

path is the directory in which find will begin to search. Any number of directories can be specified. The search is recursive.

opeators/options tells find which files you are interested in.

Advanced Bash Scripting Guide

Advanced Bash Scripting Guide - The Advanced Bash Scripting Guide is both a reference and a tutorial on shell scripting. This comprehensive book (the equivalent of about 556 print pages) covers almost every aspect of shell scripting. It contains 293 profusely commented illustrative examples, and a number of tables. Not just a shell scripting tutorial, this book also provides an introduction to basic programming techniques, such as sorting and recursion. It is well suited for either individual study or classroom use.

ClamAV - Antivirus for Linux

Clam AntiVirus is a GPL anti-virus toolkit for *nix. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers (attachment scanning). The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner, and a tool for automatic updating via Internet. The programs are based on a shared library distributed with the Clam AntiVirus package, which you can use with your own software. Most importantly, the virus database is kept up to date.

  • command-line scanner
  • fast, multi-threaded daemon
  • milter interface for sendmail

Cerberus Helpdesk

Cerberus Helpdesk is an email response system built to diminish the need for redundant, time-consuming human interaction with your customers. The system is built to allow your support/sales/billing/etc. department to react quickly to inbound customer email inquiries. It was written originally as a trouble ticket system.

Cerberus delivers a highly-customizable, intuitive interface packed with an abundance of powerful features, such as:

  • an exceptionally adaptive anti-spam system
  • comprehensive search and customer history functionality

Learning Tcl with Tcl Tutor

TclTutor is a Computer Aided Instruction package that teaches the basics of the Tcl programming language.

The 40+ lessons in this package can be completed in under 10 minutes each. You'll be ready to start simple programs after the first half dozen lessons.

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