Temporary Disabling Bash History

Guy — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:21:52 +0000

Say that you’ve got to pass some password as command line argument to something. It would probably be a bad idea to store it in your ~/.bash_history, but clearing the file isn't desired either. So you need to temporary disable the command history for the current session. You can do it by unsetting the HISTFILE environment variable.

unset HISTFILE

The result is that while the session is active you can access the history as usual, but it won't be saved to the disk. History for other sessions, will behave as usual.

Improved FTP Backup for WordPress

Guy — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:38:44 +0000

This script backups both the database and files of a WordPress blog into a remote FTP server (while keeping a local copy). It’s an update of my WordPress Backup to FTP script. The main changes are auto-detecting database settings and better support for caching plugins (specifically WP-Cache). The new version makes it easier to backup multiple WordPress blogs to the same FTP server.

Usage is pretty simple after a short initial configuration. First, save the the script and make it executable:

chmod +x wp-backup

(assuming you saved it under the name wp-backup). After saving it edit the file with your favorite editor and set the 5 configuration variable to whatever is appropriate for you. BACKUP_DIR is the folder to save the local backups to. FTP_HOST, FTP_USER, FTP_PASS control the FTP host, username and password, respectively, for the remote backup server. FTP_BACKUP_DIR sets the folder on the FTP server to save the remote backup to.

Now that the initial configuration is done, all you need to do is execute the script and give the path to the blog as an argument. For example:

./wp-backup /home/someuser/myblog

And that it, the script will backup your files (excluding cache) and database to both a local and remote locations. This allows using the same script to backup multiple WordPress blogs, unlike the previous script which had to be modified for each blog.

And now the script itself:

#!/bin/bash
 
# Copyright 2008, 2010 Guy Rutenberg 
# WordPress FTP backup 2.0
#
# Easily backup wordpress instances via ftp.
#
# Change Log:
# ===========
# 2.0:
#  - Auto-detect database settings.
#  - Exclude cache data from backups.
 
BACKUP_DIR=
FTP_HOST=
FTP_USER=
FTP_PASS=
FTP_BACKUP_DIR=
 
# end of configuration - you probably don't need to touch anything bellow
 
PROG=`basename "$0"`
print_usage () {
    echo "USAGE: ${PROG} [options] BLOG_ROOT"
    echo "Backup a WordPress blog"
}
 
print_help ()  {
    print_usage
    cat << EOF
 
Options:
    -h, --help          show this help message and exit
 
EOF
}
 
TEMP=`getopt -o h --long help -n "$PROG" -- "$@"`
if (($?)); then
    print_usage
    exit 1
fi
 
eval set -- "$TEMP"
 
while true ; do
    case "$1" in
        -h|--help) print_help; exit ;;
        --) shift; break;;
    esac
done
 
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
 print_usage > /dev/stderr
 exit 1
fi
 
BLOG_DIR=$1
DB_NAME=`echo "\"${BLOG_DIR}/wp-config.php\"); echo DB_NAME;" | php`
DB_USER=`echo "\"${BLOG_DIR}/wp-config.php\"); echo DB_USER;" | php`
DB_PASS=`echo "\"${BLOG_DIR}/wp-config.php\"); echo DB_PASSWORD;" | php`
DB_HOST=`echo "\"${BLOG_DIR}/wp-config.php\"); echo DB_HOST;" | php`
 
BLOG_DIR=`dirname "$BLOG_DIR"`/`basename "$BLOG_DIR"`
BACKUP_DIR=`dirname "$BACKUP_DIR"`/`basename "$BACKUP_DIR"`
 
echo -n "dumping database... "
DUMP_NAME=${DB_NAME}-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.bz2
mysqldump --user=${DB_USER} --password=${DB_PASS} --host=${DB_HOST} \
 --databases ${DB_NAME} \
 | bzip2 -c > ${BACKUP_DIR}/${DUMP_NAME}
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
	echo "failed!"
	exit 1
fi
echo "done"
 
echo -n "Creating tarball... "
TAR_NAME=${BLOG_DIR##*/}-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2
tar -cjf ${BACKUP_DIR}/${BLOG_DIR##*/}-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2 --exclude cache ${BLOG_DIR}
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
	echo "failed!"
	exit 2
fi
echo "done"
 
echo -n "Uploading SQL dump and tarball to FTP... "
lftp -u ${FTP_USER},${FTP_PASS} ${FTP_HOST} <
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
	echo "failed!"
	exit 3
fi
echo "done"

Guy Rutenberg » Bash

Temporary Disabling Bash History

Improved FTP Backup for WordPress