Windows: folder or file open in another program

When you try to move a folder:

    "The action can't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program"

This stunningly unhelpful error message has persisted through many versions of Windows.

The way I work around it is:

• Rename an unrelated file or folder nearby, then rename it back again.
• The original folder or file should now be "unlocked"

You can always reboot to fix it, too.

How to sync over FTP

Don't re-invent the wheel.

1) Install rsync instead, which is designed with syncing in mind.

2) ftpsync was written a decade ago. Perhaps it has been updated since.

3) lftp syncs over FTP and is being actively maintained.

4) Perl package turbo-ftp-sync may also fit the bill.

Moving a wordpress e-commerce site

• UPDATE wp_options SET option_value="http://newsite/new_dir" WHERE option_value="http://oldsite/old_dir"; -- this fixes most of the site
• UPDATE wp_options SET option_value="http://newsite/new_dir" WHERE option_value="http://oldsite/old_dir"; -- this fixes the pagination for the e-commerce plugin.
• In .htaccess:
  
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} / [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /new/$1 [L,QSA]
  

Move directory on FTP server

without downloading and re-uploading:

rnfr source_dir
rnto target_dir

Developing over FTP

Using Eclipse and RSE plugin:

• Logs in okay
• But seems to always be closing directory sub-trees I've opened in 'Remote Systems' panel
• It wants to do an 'ls' on every parent directory in the hierarchy, every time I change files. Very slow.

Using CurlFtpFS:

• Install in Ubuntu from the software centre
• to mount: curlftpfs -v username:password@server.example.com local_dir/
• to unmount: fusermount -u local_dir/
• Performance is unusably slow... Eclipse wants to know about every single file on the remote server, not just the ones I'm editing.
• Saving the file through Eclipse using CurlFtpFS takes even longer than it would to upload it separately.

Using FileZilla and gedit:

• Browsing is fast
• Editing is fast
• But you have to navigate to every file manually each session, it doesn't remember what you had open
• The system of holding temp files locally is not ideal, but FileZilla detects changes in them very nicely
• You still can't grep over the files as they're all held remotely, and it's a bit fiddly to navigate to a specific file

Editing locally with Eclipse, and uploading after changes are made:

• Write an Ant script to upload any modified files?
• ...to investigate

Password protect a directory in Apache

Put a .htaccess file in the directory you want to protect, containing:

AuthUserFile /full/path/to/your/htpasswd_file
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Password Protected Area"
AuthType Basic



require valid-user

Then use an online htpasswd generator to create the htpasswd_file at the location you specified for AuthUserFile above. Make sure this is outside your public webspace.

Ignore directories when using SVN

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/192824/svn-checkout-ignore-folder

How to change the colours of directories and files

To change the colour of directories from dark blue to light blue (cyan):

    export LS_COLORS=$(echo $LS_COLORS|sed 's/di=01;34/di=01;36/')

See also

    man dircolors

and

    dircolors --print-database

...for a list of the colours.