[pmwiki-users] Problem with trashing deleted files from a folder

tamouse mailing lists tamouse.lists at gmail.com
Fri Oct 21 03:06:19 CDT 2011


On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 8:08 AM, kirpi at kirpi.it <kirpi at kirpi.it> wrote:
> Shell commands scare me a lot.

As both a Mac and a Linux user, I don't see why this should be
so. Especially on Linux, the command line is really the way to go for
a lot of things. On the Mac, Terminal.app is readily available for
doing all kinds of cool things that often beat the GUI senseless.

> I would prefer to avoid all those text based solutions, and more when
> requiring more or less advanced Regular Expressions.
> Out of my experience I know that even a tiny error there (a single
> misplaced character) might bear to unforeseen and destructive results.
> This, coupled with the fact that my required action here is to
> "delete" files, is more than enough to make me quite scared.

Backups. Backups. Backups.


Both the PHP file managers seem like overkill just to delete a set of
files with a very clear and well-known pattern.

Developing a php script to do this should scare you more if you are
doing it on your production site.

For development and test, I have local copies of my wikis, and then
when all is good, I upload the changes to production.

This all assumes you have ssh access to your hosting location, which
you may not.


Before you delete pages, you may want to backup your wiki.d
folder. See below for a way of doing that with rsync or wget.

Continuing with the assumption you have ssh access, doing what you
want is as simple as:

$ ssh user at server 'cd path/to/pmwiki/wiki.d/Comments/; rm *,del-*'

which will remove all the deleted pages from the Comments group.

In the case where you don't have ssh access to the hosting site, I
recomment a command line tool for ftp such as ncftp. You can then do:

$ echo "rm *,del-*" | ncftp ftp://user:password@server/path/to/wiki.d/Comments/

from the command line. If showing your password in the command line
scares you, you can simply run:

$ ncftp ftp://user@server/path/to/wiki.d/Comments/

and it will prompt you for your password, and drop you into an
interactive shell. From there, you can do something like:

ncftp> ls *,del-*

to see all the deleted pages, check to make sure there aren't any you
don't actually want to delete. If you want to delete all of them, then
you can issue the command:

ncftp> rm *,del-*


BACKUPS
-------

If you do have ssh access, rsync is probably the best way to go here:

$ rsync -av user at server:path/to/wiki.d/ wiki.d.backup/

rsync will prompt you for your password, and will start copying the
files in wiki.d that have changed compared to the copies in
wiki.d.backup if you have run it before. The first time it will copy
everything. Subsequent times it will only copy changes (which speeds
things up a lot).

rsync has tons of options that make backing up and syncing directories
a breeze.

Again, if ssh isn't an option for you, you can retrieve wiki.d pages
with wget to make a backup:

$ mkdir wiki.d.backup
$ cd $_
$ wget --user=user --ask-password --quiet 'ftp://server/path/to/wiki.d/*'

This will retrieve everything in your wiki.d folder. wget tends to be
pretty verbose, which is why I set the --quiet parameter.

Of course, you should do the same thing with your uploads folder if
you have any attachments.



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