Programming

There are many Python IDEs around however I think that Wing is the most polished one. It also includes a debugger and nice context help. Although it is shareware, there is a free version which doesn't require a license. You can download a copy from here: http://wingware.com/downloads/wingide-101/installers. You can install it on both 32/64 bit systems, by forcing architecture installation:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture wingide-101-3.1_3.1.3-1_i386.deb 

Most of the modern C compilers, like gcc, which are bundled in todays distros, have stack protection enabled. Sometimes, for security researchers like me, this can be a burden because we can't compile exploitable code, getting the following error:

*** stack smashing detected ***: ./vuln.o terminated

To disable stack protection during compile time, you need to pass the -fno-stack-protector argument:

gcc -fno-stack-protector -o vuln.o vuln.c

Suppose you want to email changes in the Oracle's alert log, or maybe syslog's messages, it would be nice to email new 'tailed' entries. Something like tail -f logfile | mailx ... won't work as tail -f will never pipe any output. The idea is to take a snapshot of the file every x minutes, archive it, take another snapshot after x minutes, diff the two files, and email the changes. Then you roundrobin the snapshot and repeat the whole process:

crontab -l
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/swatch-action.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

[root]# cat /usr/local/bin/swatch-action.sh

To search and replace text in vi:

% (entire file) s (search and replace) /old text with new/ c (confirm) g (global - all)
	:%s/oldstring/newstring/cg 	  	  	

To ignore case during search

:set ic

Let's say you have a list of tables inside a text file called e_tables.txt and you want to generate an SQL file to drop these tables. With sed this is a very easy task to do:

sed -e 's/.*/DROP TABLE & CASCADE CONSTRAINTS;/' e_tables.txt

The code can be interpreted as follows. The ".*" tells sed to match every line and replace it with strings "DROP TABLE", "CASCADE CONSTRAINTS" and the matched line, denoted by "&".

The code is very simple:

while read line; do echo $line; done < file.txt

To output the result to another text file, for example after some text manipulation:

while read line; do echo "Manipulated $line"; done < file.txt > output.txt

Suppose we have the following table which consists of two columns - a user and his favorite album.

mysql> select * from albums_votes;
+-----------+----------+
| user      | album_id |
+-----------+----------+
|      1000 |        2 |
|      2000 |        3 |
|      3000 |        1 |
|      4000 |        3 |
|      5000 |        3 |
|      6000 |        3 |
| 531514255 |        1 |
| 686711159 |        2 |
| 618496371 |        2 |
| 705891065 |        2 |
+-----------+----------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Check out this link - http://mashable.com/2007/11/17/ide-toolbox/ - it contains an exhaustive list of IDEs available for the majority of the programming languages.