Shell

When you work with large CSV files it is sometimes useful to have a quick way to split the csv file into smaller pieces so that another application / process / people can work on these smaller files in parallel. Here is a nifty bash script to split a csv file into multiple pieces and retain the same header in all pieces.

I had a requirement where I had to execute shell command from PHP. The requirement was that I had to find details of a domain using commands like whois and then store this information into files in a folder. The only input parameter for the process was the name of the domain which was passed on from the Drupal site. The PHP function (shell_exec) was designed to do things like this.