• Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Inspecting and creating Mac installer packages on Linux

    Awhile back, I wrote a tool to rewrap ipa files that I called ipasign: https://github.com/krypted/ipasign/blob/master/ipasign.py. But I wanted to do something similar for the Mac, and specifically have it run in Linux. So looking at what you’d need to be able to do, let’s start with viewing the contents of a flattened Apple package. This command will show you the files installed as a part of the Node JS package. Why did I choose that package? It was sitting on my desktop… pkgutil --files org.nodejs.node.pkg Now, this logic is available because you’re running pkgutil on a Mac. But that can’t run in Linux. So what would you do if you wanted…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    basename and dirname Options

    There are two useful commands when scripting operations that involve filenames and paths. The first of these is dirname: dirname can be used to return the directory portion of a path. The second is basename: basename can be used to output the file name portion of a path. For our first example, let’s say that we have an output of /users/krypted, which we know to be the original short name of my user. To just see just that username, we could use basename to call it: basename /users/charlesedge Basename can also be used to trim output. For example, let’s say there was a document called myresume.pdf in my home folder…

  • Mac OS X,  Unix

    View The Content Of Files Without Comments In Bash

    So I comment a lot of lines out in my /etc/hosts file. This usually means that I end up with a lot of cruft at the top of my file. And while I write comments into files and scripts here and there, I don’t always want to see them. So I can grep them out by piping the output of the file to grep as follows: cat /etc/hosts | grep -v "^#" You could also do the same, eliminating all lines that start with a “v” instead: cat !$ | grep -v "^v"

  • SQL

    Install MySQL on Linux

    Installing MySQL on Linux is pretty easy. You can use yum (or your favorite package manager for most installs. Here, we’ll pull a list of packages from yum using repolist: yum repolist enabled | grep "mysql.*-community.*" You’ll then get a list of community edition MySQL packages that are available. Then let’s say you’re installing on RHEL 6, we’ll pull a string from the repolist of an appropriate package and then do a localinstall of it: sudo yum localinstall mysql57-community-release-el6-157.noarch.rpm We could also grab mysql and all the other stuffs we want to have with it: yum install mysql mysql-server mysql-libs mysql-server And then start it up: service mysql start

  • SQL

    Reset A Lost MySQL Password

    The first step to reset a password is to stop the MySQL daemon. This will cause mysqld to accept no new connections and terminate existing connections. But this can all be done in a matter of seconds, usually. To stop MySQL on Mac, use the System Preference pane or launchctl. To stop on Linux, use init.d: sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop Or if it’s mysqld instead: sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld stop Then start the SQL daemon using the –skip-grant-tables option: sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables & Next, login to mysql, which won’t require a password running in this mode: mysql -u root And use the UPDATE USER statement to set a new password: UPDATE USER set…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Using Inputs in Bash Scripts

    You can easily accept user provided input in bash by using the read command in bash for Linux and OS X. Here, we’ll echo out a choice to a user in a script, read the output into a variable called yn and then echo out the response: echo "Please enter y or n: " read yn echo "You chose wrong: $yn" Here, we used echo to simply write out what was chosen in the input. But we could also take this a little further and leverage a case statement to then run an action based on the choice selected: read -p "Should the file extension change warning be disabled (y/n)?…

  • Mac OS X,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    cd To The Previous Directory

    The cd command has lots of fun little shortcuts. One I use frequently is the -. The ~ always takes you to your home directory, but using cd – will take you to the last directory you were in. For example, if you do the following on a Mac: cd ~ Then you do .. (which is a shortcut for the directory above the one you’re in): cd .. Then pwd will show that you’re in /Users. But, if you cd to – again: cd - Now you’re back in your home folder. The – expands to OLDPWD. Quick tip. Nothing more to see here.

  • Mac OS X,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Bash: A Silly wc Example

    The wc command is used to count words, characters and lines. Here, we’ll run it a few different ways. -l shows the number of lines in a file. For example, in my home directory, I can use it to see how many lines are in my .gitconfig file: wc -l .gitconfig This would output something like the following: 11 .gitconfig Or count the number of characters with -c: wc -c .gitconfig Or check the number of words: wc -w .gitconfig You can also run it against multiple files. For example, here I’ll check the number of lines in both my .gitconfig file and my .gitignore_global files: wc -l .gitconfig .gitignore_global…