Add line numbers to your source code with expand and some quick perl:

expand /etc/motd | perl -pe 's/^/\t=$.=\t/'

Add the following code to the top of a CGI Python script to enable colorized, annotated traceback formatting whenever a fatal error occurs in your script:

import cgitb; cgitb.enable()

When in development mode, this is likely more helpful than a '500 Internal Server Error'.

Use the pycolor tool included with ipython. It will format the source using ASCII codes so it looks pretty in your terminal:

$ pycolor foo.py

os.mkdir raises a generic exception if an error occurs, but typically you need to ignore preexisting directory errors. Here's how to ignore them:

import os, errno, sys

myPath = "/path/to/dir"
try:
    os.mkdir(myPath)
except Exception, e:
    code, st = e
    if code != errno.EEXIST:
        st = "Error creating directory '%s': %s" % (myPath, str(e))
        sys.exit(1)

An essential part of any CGI written in perl that will push all the fatal errors to the browser instead of punting with the all-too-familiar 500 Internal Server error:

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);

Type perldoc -f <function_name> for syntax help. Also, perldoc -q <regexp> will search question headings in the perlfaq[1-9] man pages.

An often-used concept in shell scripting is globbing. You can use this in python, as well:

import glob

for textFile in glob.glob("*.txt"):
    # Do something with 'textFile'.

Use the psycopg.Binary() function to escape the binary data:

>>> db = psycopg.connect("dbname=%s user=%s" % (database, user))
>>> db.autocommit(True)
>>> cursor = db.cursor()
>>> file = "/path/to/binary_file.jpg"
>>> fd = open(file, "r")
>>> contents = fd.read(os.stat(file)[6])
>>> fd.close()
>>> cursor.execute("INSERT INTO pr0n (image) VALUES (%s)", (psycopg.Binary(contents)))

If you're using os.system to run a command (such as xterm running man) and you get "broken pipe" errors, you can restore standard pipe functionality with the signal module:

import signal
signal.signal(signal.SIGPIPE, signal.SIG_DFL)

# Call os.system after calling signal.signal.

Note: information taken from http://monkeyfingers.org/ (page now unavailable).

Here's how to declare parameter arrays in C++/CLI:

int Add(... List<int>^ numbers)
{
    int total = 0;
    for each(int i in numbers)
    {
        total += i;
    }
    return total;
}

To make print suppress its usual trailing newline, add a comma to the end of the statement:

print "Foo",
print "Foo %s" % (bar),

If you're using the psycopg Python module to connect to Postgres, you may find that you have old scripts that use version 1 of psycopg but you have version 2 installed and don't want to modify your scripts. At the time of this writing (and according to http://initd.org/tracker/psycopg/wiki/Migration), the version 2 module provides a very easy "compatibility mode". Just import the psycopg1 submodule and alias it, or fall back to the version 1 module if version 2 is not available:

try:
    # Try importing the compatibility submodule, which will only
    # work if psycopg version 2 is available.
    import psycopg.psycopg1 as psycopg
except Exception, e:
    # Fall back to version 1.
    import psycopg

If you need your script to have access to ActiveRecord, ActiveMail, et al. you can place these directives at the top of your script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'activesupport'

Sometimes it's necessary to access raw post data. The easiest way to do this is by opening the php://input stream:

$fp = fopen('php://input', 'r');

Remove duplicate elements from a list:

newList = dict([(item, 1) for item in oldList]).keys()

Or, if you have Python 2.3 or newer, you can use a Set object to collapse your list:

import sets
newList = list(sets.Set(oldList))

If you're having to match lines that start with # you can avoid using an expression if you do something like this:

foreach ($lines as $line) {
    if ($line{0} != '#') {
        // We have a non-comment, print it.
        echo $line . '<br />';
    }
}

Given an array @slobber, replace all the CR-LF with CR:

foreach (@slobber) {
   s/\015\012$/\n/; print;
}

Beware that on some versions of PHP, the PHP session ID value is a hexadecimal hash but on some newer systems the configuration is used to adjust the contents of the session ID string:

; Define how many bits are stored in each character when converting
; the binary hash data to something readable.
;
; 4 bits: 0-9, a-f
; 5 bits: 0-9, a-v
; 6 bits: 0-9, a-z, A-Z, "-", ","
session.hash_bits_per_character = 5

Use this elisp snippet (in your ~/.emacs) to instruct your Emacs python-mode to use the proper python executable on a system with multiple pythons installed:

(setq py-python-command "/usr/bin/python2.3")

You can specify the search path(s) used by ld at runtime to find shared objects by building your program with the -rpath option:

$ gcc -Xlinker -rpath -Xlinker /path/to/my/libraries filename.c

This is the equivalent of:

$ ld -rpath /path/to/my/libraries filename.o

You can use PHP's trim function to remove non-printable characters:

$string = trim($string, "\x7f..\xff\x0..\x1f");

If you want to list the symbols of your object code, you can use the nm command:

$ nm object_file.o

When using sessions in PHP, the default PHP configuration causes PHP to send a no-cache header to your browser so that session-managed pages are not cached. Sometimes this is not the desired behavior, such as when writing a script whose output is binary data such as images which are stored in a database. If this is the case, you can turn off the caching by using functions to modify the PHP configuration on a per-request basis. Call these functions before calling the session_start() function:

// Let the browser and proxies cache output
session_cache_limiter('public');

// One-day (60 * 24, in minutes) cache expiration time for output
session_cache_expire(60 * 24);

(Note: this behavior is documented at http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php.)

If you need a function to build a big block of text and return it at the end, you may be concatenating all of the pieces of text into one big string. Rather, you can use a generator to return the text cleanly and efficiently:

def buildText():
    yield "This is the first line."
    for i in range(10):
        yield "Line %d" % (i)
    yield "This is the last line."

Then, you can automatically build a list of the generator's results:

results = list(buildText())

(To learn more about generators, see "the python tutorial" at http://docs.python.org/tut/node11.html#SECTION00111000000000000000000.)