Skip navigation

Runaway upload conclusion

So after I stopped the FTP upload from my inappropriate account , I needed to delete the 726 megs of “illegal” uploads.
I remembered the ‘rmdir’ command, but that only works on empty directories. I remember this fact as soon as I was given the ‘rmdir: failed to remove `Pictures/’: Directory not empty” response on the command line.
I once again turned to my buddy Duckduckgo and found the answer.
I needed use the remove command with the recursive parameter ‘-r’.
About two seconds after I entered the ‘rm -r Pictures/’ command, the folder and all of its contents were gone. All four hours of uploading gone in the blink of an eye.
It is two weeks later and I am at about 10.7 GB uploated of my 25Gb total. The 512kbps upload of my AT&T DSL is really not doing it for me right now. Still not enough motivation to switch to Charter though. Maybe in 5 more months when they try to jack up my rates again.

Linux command of the day

So I decided to take advantage of the free 50Gb storage space that DreamHost offers all of its webhosting customers today.
Unfortunately, I didn’t understand that I needed to use a special user account that Dreamhost provides for me for this activity. So I am currently uploading approximately 25Gb of pictures to my account on just a normal user account. I may have my account revoked by the end of the day, who knows.
The situation isn’t too dire just yet, as evidenced by the linux command I just learned.
I logged in to my account from work to see how much data had been uploaded so far. I found the folder, but had no idea how to actually see any detail on the folder’s size. Performing a quick DuckDuckGo search has taught me to use the ‘du’ command to see the size of a folder.
So I ran ‘du -sh /Pictures’ and was greeted with the following response:
616M    Pictures/
The -s parameter means to ‘summarize’. This provides only the disk usage of the specified argument, in my case, the size of the ‘Pictures’ folder. Without this parameter, I would be given an itemized list of the disk size of all of the folders within this folder.

The -h paramenter means to make the output ‘human-readable’. Namely, converting the raw ‘616543’ kilobyte size to ‘616M’. Very handy since I hate mental math.

So its not too bad now, but I gotta get home and stop this from getting worse. Good thing its lunch time.
I can stop the process and start uploading using the appropriate account now.

Well I’m off to stop a runaway FTP upload. Times like these that I really wish I had set up my laptop for remote contol…

The cat-brained coder

image

This is my first attempt at a blog. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, but it never felt like my ideas were fleshed out enough or I had enough time to sit down and come up with something decent. That is still true today. But, inspired by this Coding Horror post, and realizing that waiting for the perfect moment is not teaching me anything. So I’m starting up this blog, in all of its hideous, useless glory and just pressing onward with the experience.