Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

I had some success last night with the My::Portal CGI::Application superclass I'm building -- I actually got it working with CGI::Wiki::Simple (after I debugged the latter to fix some delegation issues!). Now that I know the "proof-of-concept" works, I'm ready to start in on some other issues.

The first issue is: how can I specify different directories for different applications to search for templates, while retaining the default directory so that the superclass can build the final page? I could always simply keep all templates in a single directory and simply prefix them, but that seems inelegant, somehow. I'll need to explore how HTML::Template integration works with CGI::App.

Second, and closely related: how do I want it to look, in the end? I could see keeping the design we have -- it's clean, simple, and yet somehow functionally elegant. Okay, I'm exaggerating -- it's your standard three-column with header and footer. But it goes with the idea of blocks of content. I need to think about that.

I saw a design idea for a WikiWikiWeb today, though, that totally changed my ideas of how a Wiki should look. I hadn't been to Wikipedia for some time, but a Google link to Gaston Julia showed up on Slashdot as it shut down a site in Australia, and so I visited it. I like the new design -- it separates out the common links needed into a nice left menu, and puts a subset of that at the top and bottom of the main column as well, using nice borders to visually separate things. I much prefer it to PhpWiki's default style, as well as to anything else I've really seen so far relating to Wiki layout.

I've had occasion to need to grab a specific set of files from a large directory -- most recently, I needed to grab some specific access logs from our Apache logfiles at work.

Enter find.

I needed to get all files newer than a specific date, and with the pattern 'sitename-access_log.timestamp.gz'. I then needed to tar up these files and grab them for processing. So, here's what I did:

• The -newer filename tells find to locate files newer than filename.
• The -regex flag tells find to locate files matching the regular expression. The regex that find uses is a little strange, however, and didn't follow many conventions I know; for one thing, it's assumed that the pattern you write will match against the entire string, and not just a portion of it. What I ended up using was -regex '.*access_log.*gz', and that worked.
• The -printf flag tells find to format the printing. This is useful when using the output of find in another program. For instance, tar likes a list of filenames... so I used printf "%p ", which separated each filename with a space.

I then backticked my full find statement and used it as the final argument to a tar command; voila! instant tar file with the files I need!