Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

TOPIC: USER

Automating FTP I: UNIX and Linux

11th April 2008

Having got tired of repeated typing in everything at the prompt of an interactive command line FTP session and doing similar things via the GUI route, I started to wonder if there was a scripting alternative and, lo and behold, I found it after a spot of googling. There are various opportunities for its extension such as prompting for username and password instead of the risky approach of including them in a script or cycling through a directory structure but here's the foundation stone for such tinkering anyway:

HOSTNAME='ftp.server.host'
USER='user'
PSSWD='password'
REP_SRC='source_directory'
REP__DEST='destination_directory'
FILENAME='*'

rm -rf log_file.tmp

cd "${REP_DEST}"

ftp -i -n -v <<EndFTP >>log_file.tmp 2>>log_file.tmp
open ${HOSTNAME}
user ${USER} ${PSSWD}
prompt
cd "${REP_SRC}"
mget "${FILENAME}"
EndFTP

cd ~

Turning off WordPress’ visual editor

27th March 2007

When I was doing something that required custom XHTML and got sick of the way in which the Visual Editor was mangling my code, I went and turned it off. It's not in the obvious place where I would expect it. Apparently, it's a per-user setting, so you find the relevant tick box (check box in the U.S.) on the Your Profile page in the Users section on your administration dashboard. I would have expected it under Options > Writing, but I suppose that they wanted to leave the choice to users without having some jobsworth administrator getting carried away with their limited authority. Speaking of Options > Writing, that's where you can make the editing box bigger. Now, that might be another user setting... It's hardly consistent, is it?

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