Say you have yourself an Apache 2 server on Unix (naturally), but you’d like the logs to end up on a remote machine, for any number of reasons (security, backup, just plain having all your logs in one place, what have you). So you set up rsyslogd on your log machine, set up syslog on your web servers to point to it… and you get nothing from Apache. Apache doesn’t go through syslog by default, writing its own log files instead.

The solution for Apache’s error logs is obvious enough: just add “ErrorLog syslog” to your config file. But mysteriously, there’s no analogous directive for the access logs. The solution is still straightforward enough, and it looks like:

CustomLog "|/usr/bin/logger -p local1.info -t apache2" common

I suppose this shouldn’t seem shocking, but when we were looking this up, many people seemed to forget that (a) the “logger” program exists already, and (b) you can pass options to it directly from the Apache config file, without an intermediate script. In other words, there’s no need at all to be writing additional scripts, which you might not have known based on the Google results I was getting earlier.

I’ve been automating a bunch of stuff with various rake tasks in a Rails project. One task in particular, has a line similar to the following:

curl --user bob@foo.com:password https://foo.com/db.sql > db.sql

Which, when run, yields the following error:

curl: (1) Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl

To fix it, do the following:

sudo port deactivate curl
sudo port install curl +ssl

And voila.

As an example, say you have a project that involves a mix of C++ and Python files, and you want to find all the occurrences of “foo” in just the Python files (this happens to me all the time these days). With grep, you have to say find . -name \*.py | xargs grep "foo", or thereabouts, whereas with ack it’s just ack "foo" --python. For languages with multiple possible extensions (e.g. Perl, C++), this is even nicer.

OK, maybe you’ve already set up all the grep aliases you could ever want, so never type those ugly command lines any more. Even so, I still love ack, because the search results are that much more readable: the filename only shows up once per file, with each match within the file having only the line number taking up space, like so:

$ ack Hello
hello.c
3:// Prints "Hello, world!"
6:    printf("Hello, world!");

I find this makes the results significantly more readable. And what I haven’t tried to replicate above is how it highlights both matches and the filename with a bit of colour, making it even easier to scan.

And on top of all that, “ack” ignores your editor’s swap files by default, and is 25% less typing than “grep”! So give it a spin, I started liking it right away.