I wasn’t able to sleep, so I wrote this Perl script to backup a directory and mail yourself a copy. Change the variables in CAPS to suit your needs. It’s best to run this script as a cronjob.
Download a plaintext copy here.
Updated 5/8/2005: I’ve modified the code to use the File::Find library instead of a glob. My previous iteration of the code ignored hidden files (easily fixable by adding a second glob) and sub-directories. This new version fixes those two issues.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# This script creates an in-memory gzipped tar archive of the $BACKUP_DIR
# and emails the archive to an email account.
# Copyright Stephen Le
# Last Modified: May 8, 2005
# http://stephen.evilcoder.com
use MIME::Lite;
use Archive::Tar;
use Compress::Zlib;
use File::Find;
use strict;
my $SENDER = 'sender@domain.com';
my $RECIPIENT = 'recipient@domain.com';
my $BACKUP_DIR = '/directory/to/backup';
my $tar = Archive::Tar->new;
find(\&wanted, $BACKUP_DIR);
sub wanted {
$tar->add_files($File::Find::name);
}
my $msg = MIME::Lite->new(
From => $SENDER,
To => $RECIPIENT,
Subject => "Backup of " . $BACKUP_DIR . " at " . localtime,
Type => "multipart/mixed",
);
$msg->attach(
'Type' => 'application/octet-stream',
'Encoding' => 'base64',
'Filename' => "backup.tar.gz",
'Data' => Compress::Zlib::memGzip( $tar->write )
);
$msg->send;
It’s pretty and colorful now! xD
Yup! Unfortunately, the plugin doesn’t cache the pretty code formatting — every time this post is loaded, it must re-generate the markup. Under normal loads, this is acceptable, but I’m afraid that, with a steady stream of visits, it’ll lag down my server. Unfortunately I can’t come up with a good way to cache the formatting. *sigh*
This script has proven to be especially useful in recent days, as I’ve been able to have automatic backups of important directories on my server and laptop automatically saved on gmail. Combined with the + tagging — your_email_addy+some_random_tag@gmail.com — this script is a lifesaver.
look for http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/GeshiSyntaxColorer
maybe you’ll like my coloring plugin in advance
Thanks for the link, mk!
It looks like GeSHi might be more efficient than Enscript. I’ll test the plugin when I get a chance.
Hi Stephen, thanks for the script. I tried changing it around a little but was unsuccessful (not well versed in perl quite yet). What I’m trying to do is get the script to only include files with a .php, .css, .html file extensions. Any ideas?
The ‘wanted’ function determines which files are added to the tar archive. It basically acts as a filter. Since this script was designed to add all files in a directory, the filter is wide open — it performs no match/check.
You can add a match/check by using logical operations as so:
sub wanted {
/(php|css|html)$/i && $tar->add_files($File::Find::name);
}
The above subroutine uses a case-insensitive regular expression to check if the filename ends in either php, css, or html.
I haven’t actually tried this code, but it should work. If not, tell me and I’ll figure out why.
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