tip

Downloading WordPress minus the content directory.

Downloading WordPress minus the content directory.

tip, WordPress

The default version of WordPress comes with an entire content directory full stuff you probably don’t want or need like the default themes and the hellodolly.php plugin unless your setting you your site for the very first time, even then probably not.

There is however a well hidden version of WordPress that comes minus a content directory, it’s purpose is to optimise WordPress’ auto update function, if you click the update WordPress button in the dashboard and watch carefully you’ll see a url similar to this flash up on your screen:

https://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.8.1-no-content.zip

simply substitute '3.8.1' with the version you require.

This is really handy if you’re managing your site with SVN or GIT or Composer and want to reduce the amount of clutter and extra files you download.

Zenith Z-19 Terminal

How to use TAR and GZIP

Linux, OSX, tip, Tools

I’ve been doing a lot of server maintenance recently and have found myself having to archive and transfer file to and from different server, as a result I’m continually looking at the man page for TAR trying to figure out which exact flags to use in each situation.

See the guide below for a quick 101:

How to TAR a Directory

  • -z: Compress archive using gzip program
  • -c: Create archive
  • -v: Verbose i.e display progress while creating archive
  • -f: Archive File name

For example, you have directory called /home/jerry/prog and you would like to compress this directory then you can type tar command as follows:

$ tar -zcvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz /home/jerry/prog

Above command will create an archive file called prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz in current directory.

NB. the -v flag “Verbose” is optional  and prints a list of each item added or extracted to the console.

How to Extract a TAR

If you wish to restore your archive then you need to use following command (it will extract all files in current directory):

$ tar -zxvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz

Where,

  • -x: Extract files

If you wish to extract files in particular directory, for example in /tmp then you need to use following command:

$ tar -zxvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz -C /tmp
$ cd /tmp
$ ls -

Source(s)

I can’t remember the exact source of this example but its been used and reused all over the web.. here’s a few places it maybe from: