script

Deploy only your JSP files with this Ant build task

A lot of times when you're working on a Java web application you only need to deploy your JSP files. This happens, for instance, when you're just editing the JSP files to modify the look and feel of your web application. In cases like this there's no need to rebuild your entire application, deploy it, then restart your application server (Tomcat, Glassfish, JBoss, whatever).

By Alvin Alexander on October 17, 2012

Example of the Ant war task (sample Ant build script)

Ant war task example: Here's another snippet of code from my most recent Ant build scripts. This example code shows how I use the Ant war task to create my war file:

By Alvin Alexander on April 14, 2013

Sample Ant clean, prepare, and compile tasks

Summary: An Ant clean, prepare, and compile example.

I'm not going to discuss the following Ant build script code too much, but I thought I would share it here. In short, it shows how I declare several Ant tasks, including my typical clean, prepare, and compile tasks.

By Alvin Alexander on April 14, 2013

MySQL Shell scripts - Start a MySQL server and client on a non-standard port

MySQL shell scripts and port FAQ: Can you share some MySQL examples that show how to start MySQL on a non-standard port (non default port)?

For a variety of reasons you may want or need to run your MySQL server on a different port than the default MySQL port of 3306. In those cases the easiest thing you can do is create a Unix/Linux shell script to start your MySQL server on some other port.

By Alvin Alexander on March 6, 2011

Unix/Linux shell script reference page

Linux shell script test syntax

All of the shell script tests that follow should be performed between the bracket characters [ and ], like this:

if [ true ]
then
  # do something here
fi

Very important: Make sure you leave spaces around the bracket characters.

I'll show more detailed tests as we go along.

Linux shell file-related tests

To perform tests on files use the following comparison operators:

By Alvin Alexander on April 10, 2011

A Perl script to convert Nagios/Unix epoch time to a human readable format

I had to work with Nagios a lot this morning, in particular reading through the nagios.log log file. If you're ever read that log file, or looked at some other Linux/Unix log files, you've seen records that display the time in an epoch time format, which looks like this:

1219822177

If you can read the epoch time format and know the actual human readable date and time, you're a better person than I am (or you've been looking at Nagios, Linux, or Unix log files too long).

By Alvin Alexander on August 30, 2011

A simple Expect script to test an FTP server

I'm not going to explain this very much, but here's an Expect script that I wrote to test an FTP server:

By Alvin Alexander on August 21, 2008

Debug Ant build problems with echo statements

Ant FAQ: How to use echo commands to debug Ant build scripts.

I've been moving back and forth between a ton of different computers lately -- Mac, Linux, and Windows computers -- and I had some problems with an Ant build script. This particular Ant script is complex, and I kept making mistakes, and needed a good way to debug the build process as I set up my application on these different systems.

By Alvin Alexander on May 3, 2013

Ant tip: How to dynamically add all your jar files to your classpath

Here's some sample code you can use in your Ant build scripts to add all the jar files in a directory tree (typically your lib directory) to define a classpath for your Ant build/compile task:

By Alvin Alexander on March 22, 2013

A shell script to search multiple jar files for a Java class or pattern

I've found that there are several times when I need to be able to find a Java class inside of a jar file. Usually this happens when something isn't working, and I get something like a Java ClassNotFoundException. In the process of debugging this problem -- especially if I'm using a jar library that I haven't used before -- I list the contents of one or more jar files to debug the problem.