Make ColdFusion on Ubuntu case-insensitive - apache

I've installed apache2 and ColdFusion 9 on an Ubuntu 12.04 box. I've already use the CheckSpelling mod in Apache to disable case-sensitive URLs and other paths that Apache is responsible for.
Now, keep in mind, I'm working with about 4GB of legacy code (about 6 years worth) and very little is up to convention. The coders before me were not concerned with case sensitivity, seeing as how the application was hosted on a Windows Box. For the most part, ColdFusion is behaving with <cfinclude> and CreateObject, but it seems like <cfinvoke> (which is used quite often in the codebase) is still case sensitive.
Now, I've tried the method of moving the code onto a vfat partition, but what I ran into was a whole bunch of encoding issues with filenames (we deal with foreign companies and get a lot of special characters). Deleting and/or renaming the files would be cumbersome, as most are also referred to in the MySQL database, and would have to be modified there as well. So recoding is somewhat of a nightmare.
So, I'm curious if ColdFusion has any special flags when running on Linux to be case insensitive, or if there is another method for making this all come together?
EDIT
I'm Sorry, I was mistaken. cfinvoke seems to work ok. I'm choking on cfobject

I did some research, and this is what I came up with...
Creating Custom Tags (help.adobe.com)
Note: Although tag names in ColdFusion pages are not case sensitive, custom tag filenames must be lowercase on UNIX.
cfinvoke Documentation (help.adobe.com)
On UNIX systems, ColdFusion searches first for a file with a name that matches the specified component name, but is all lower case. If it does not find the file, it looks for a file name that matches the component name exactly, with the identical character casing.
Since <cfinvoke> is a standard tag, the tag itself is case-insensitive. However, it sounds like all component argument(s) to <cfinvoke> need to have a lower-case filenames in order for calls with irregular casing to succeed consistently. I know you said refactoring is difficult, but this is what I've come up with:
If you have a folder where you specifically keep components, it's trivial to run a shell script in that folder that renames them all to have lower-casing (remove -i if you don't want to be asked if you're sure each time):
for filename in *.cfc; do
lowercase =`echo $filename | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`
mv -i $filename $lowercase
done
If you don't have the components all in the same folder, try it from the top directory.
Let me know if you were able to give this a shot!

Related

Missing vim indentation files

I've always wondered why vim lacks some indentation files that would be handy for everyday life. Example: I sometimes have to deal with really messed up apache config files (/etc/apache2/sites-available/*). It's impossible to have them indented correctly by vim. With apache config files I usually try to improve indentation by typing
:set ft=xml
gg=G
:set ft=apache
I know that apache configuration files are not XML and that XML indentation doesn't work remarkably good here, but at least it's better than having every config line in the first column. There's a vim script which seems to work correctly but I have to install it on all Linux systems. If we take this plugin as an example: It's from 2007 - why did it never make it into a vim release?
The maintainer of the [indent] script has to submit the file to Bram (Vim's BDFL) for inclusion (and commit to maintaining it); that's how the process works. So, if you want to have this in the runtime, please ask the maintainer, or, (as the last update of that script on vim.org is from 2007 and he may be gone), ask on the vim_dev mailing list for someone to volunteer as such.
But... you shouldn't have to rely on those files being in the official runtime. Unless you're an atypical user without any customization, you must already have a mechanism in place to distribute your personal ~/.vimrc and plugins; if you put the script into ~/.vim/indent/, you should be all set.

How to remove .efs file extension from 1000's of recovered files in one folder

I recently recovered a 1.5TB external HDD that crashed. The program I used to recover the files was Active Undelete Enterprise, it's excellent. When the files were successfully recovered they were all saved with a .efs extension so files looked like mydocument.docx.efs. At first I thought they were encrypted and needed to be decrypted, I spent 10 mins on it and realized I just need to remove the .efs from the entire filename and the mydocument.docx works perfectly. Problem is now I have over 55,000 files within hundreds of folders where I need to simply remove the .efs after each file. Does anyone know how to do this?
From a command prompt window, navigate to the top level directory where these files reside.
Type the command
DIR /S/B >>filelist.txt
This command will give you a bare format file listing of the current directory plus all nested subdirectories without any extraneous information. The list will be contained in the text file named "filelist.txt" or whatever else you choose to call it. I would then use this text file in a text editor to convert every line of text from, for example,
C:\Users\dlucas\.gimp-2.8\mathmap\file1.png.efs
to
rename c:\Users\dlucas\.gimp-2.8\mathmap\file1.png.efs file1.png
to give a simple example of a file that I just found on my system using this method.
You will need to use a text editor with a columnar editing capability since you have to modify som many files. Old programmer's editors such as CodeWright made this really simple while modern editors such as Eclipse or Notepad++ make this a little more difficult and may require a columnar editing plugin, depending on version. You basically have to make a columnar copy of all of the text in the file, and then paste the copy off to the far right - far enough that a second column of filenames and paths won't overwrite any of the existing file names and paths. You can then use columnar editing features to select and delete the path names of the text in the 2nd column since the rename command requires that the 2nd argument be simply the base filename and extension without the path information. You can use the columnar editing features to prepend every line with "RENAME ". If you attempt to do this without columnar editing features, you will find it slow going!
An alternate way to do this is to use a command formed from a "regular expression" to create the rename command. If you are not familiar with "regular expressions", ask a programmer friend as this is not an easy topic to learn from scratch. If you are familiar with regular expressions, this is probably the simplest way to perform this task. I haven't used them in many years and no longer recall the exact syntax to use or I would tell you myself.
Regardless of what kind of editor you use, the goal is to turn this ASCII file list of paths and filenames into a batch file (simply rename file1.txt to file1.bat when you are finished editing). You can then run the batch file by typing file1.bat at a command prompt.
I have just run into this same problem myself using the same really wonderful tool that you used. I am writing this while waiting for the undelete program to finish. That it restores files with this extra extension seems very anti-intuitive so I will look for an option to make it not do this when it finishes. If I find one, I will post a new answer here that is more specific to this tool. Otherwise, I am going to have rename all kazillion files just as you had to.
You experienced this problem because the disk that you recovered your files to "does not support encryption", according to the Active# UNDELETE documentation. The documentation offers no further explanation of what kind of disks support encryption, etc.
They offer a Decrypt command that restores the file's proper names as a post processing step. Unfortunately, this requires that you "include" each and every file to be decrypted, with no support for wildcards and parsing subdirectories so that is a non-starter, in my opinion given that both of us have hundreds of thousands of files to be renamed.
I did find that by selecting a normal fixed (non-removable) hard drive as the destination of the recovery effort, that the resulting files do not end up encrypted (i.e., they are recovered with the proper file name and extension). I originally chose a large USB based flash drive and the files were stored in their "encrypted" state (not really encrypted, but possibly potentially so and thus they give the .efs extension). Of course, this meant that I had to run the command all over again after switching to a regular hard drive (takes about 16 hours to recover 80GB worth of files due to presence of many sector CRC errors).

assets/stylesheets vs public/stylesheets

Under the section "Cascading Style Sheets" in M. Hartl's Rails 3 tutorial he mentions copying the CSS blueprint directory into the 'public/stylesheets' folder. My stylesheets folder resides within the assets directory. Is it reasonable to copy the blueprint directory into the 'assets/stylesheets' instead of the 'public/styleshets'? If not, what might be your suggestion? If so, are there any particular pitfalls of which you might suggest I be mindful?
He clearly suggested using Rails 3.0.1, though I am running 3.2.6. I should have followed his directions to the mark, but I had an almost impossible time getting the environment up and running on my Windows machine (MySQL conflicts, etc... ) and it just so happened that this version ended up working for me so I went with it.
Don't assume I know what I'm talking about, because I'm new to RoR, but I just spent the last few hours reading up on the asset pipeline after running into problems with it. I'll share a few things I've learned that might help you conceptualize:
Anything in public/ is left just the way it is, and server as static files directly by the web server. There are two points worth considering regarding public/ assets, though:
1) They don't get the benefits of precompiling, which include:
1a) fingerprinting - Appending an md5 hash based on file contents to the filename, so that the filename changes when the file changes, forcing caches to reload. This is useful if the file might change some day (a new version of blueprint, in your case).
1b) concatenation - The precompiler can/will combine multiple CSS or JS files into one, which makes the download faster. (Exactly what files get compiled and into how many is configurable.)
1c) minification - The precompiler removes whitespace (and other clever optimizations) to shrink down the size of your CSS/JS files.
2) I'm still trying to figure this part out, but whether something is in /app/assets and goes through precompile affects whether and how helper methods work (things like asset_tag, image_tag, and javascript_include tag, which you use in your views).
Even though I'm totally unqualified, I'm seriously considering starting my own Rails Assets Best Practices page on a wiki somewhere to start organize my thoughts. I think it's sorely lacking - I've had to dredge bits of knowledge from many places, and some of what people are suggesting I find objectionable (like modifying config files to precompile add unmanifested assets).
I have copied my stylesheet files to app/assets folder and it worked normally

Is using .. as parent directory cross platform?

More as a curiosity, if I want to prevent some code from looking at the parent directory (contained in a list of files/directories) and I do something along the lines of (e.g. Perl) next if /^.+$/ to exclude . and .. , is this sufficiently cross-platform? If not, which platforms are different and how might one prevent accessing the parent in that case?
It will work in most modern platforms. (It will also exclude Unix hidden files/directories, but this is probably a good thing given the context.) Windows has a special case at the root of a drive, but it's not so much "different syntax" as "not there in any syntax"; if you have any intention of using platforms such as OpenVMS or Z/OS, it won't work at all.
Note that Perl and Python ship with cross-platform path utilities that you should use instead. I couldn't tell you about PHP or Ruby but I presume both also do so.
Doesn't work in ZX Spectrum. :)
Seriously, pretty much all platforms in current wide use (i.e. MSDOS, Windows, *NIX including Linux) conform to that. Be aware you will also be excluding hidden directories in UNIX-like systems.

files opened by a process on VMS

I have a DCL script on VMS which calls a perl script. Is there a VMS/DCL command I can use that will tell me every file handle opened by the perl script?
Set default to the disk the app runs from (or you might have to try each disk in succession if it's a really large or distributed app). Then the command is
show device/files/nosystem
If you're on a more recent version of VMS and the lists are too long, you can pipe it with a search by doing this:
pipe show device/files/nosystem | search sys$input (name of perl script)
You need to find the documentation for undocumented VMS features :-)
Seriously I think that set watch might do what you want. If you issue
$ set watch file/class=(all,nodump)
$ perl yourperlscript.pl
You will get loads of output that will hopefully include what you want. I havent done it for years, you probably tune the options to fine tune it. See
http://www.parsec.com/openvms/undocumented.php?page=13
Jason, I need more clarification for a). Are you saying that you want to run your perl script in a batch file and have the batch file monitor the files being accessed by the perl script? Or something else?
Hmm, not sure about that. Maybe add a linux tag to your post so that some linux people can see this and chime in. I'm not sure why your perl program wouldn't know what files it opened. It's your program, wouldn't it access the files you told it to access? Or if you're computing the filenames somehow (which I've done in cobol, but still know at least which directory to find them in, and what naming scheme they use), you'd still have clues like what I mention. Also, since it's your program, and if you're computing the filenames, coudn't you also make your Perl program output it's own little report of what the files were? Like, just after it computes the filename, have it copy the name string to a separate report file.