{"id":4,"date":"2015-09-16T12:35:27","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T12:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/?p=4"},"modified":"2015-09-16T20:15:27","modified_gmt":"2015-09-16T20:15:27","slug":"cfexecute-on-unix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/09\/16\/cfexecute-on-unix\/","title":{"rendered":"CFEXECUTE on Unix"},"content":{"rendered":"

Usually, I don’t have many issues that are unix-specific when working in ColdFusion. CFEXECUTE is one of those tags that is a little more, shall we say… annoying? It’s quite common to try and execute a command line in Unix and have no result and no errors.<\/p>\n

Here’s some tips that I’ve found helpful throughout the years:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Try specifying the full path. Don’t just “tar” “ln” or “echo” — specify the full path, like “\/usr\/bin\/ln” instead.<\/li>\n
  2. You do need to make sure that you have permissions to execute that command. Try it manually as your CF user.<\/li>\n
  3. Arguments can be tricky. The CF docs<\/a> say, if passed as a string, it needs to be “tokenized into an array of arguments” and “The default token separator is a space; you can delimit arguments that have embedded spaces with double-quotation marks.” If passed as an array, “elements are copied into an array of exec() arguments”. If it’s a simple argument, using a string is fine. For something with multiple arguments, I’ve found that it’s just cleaner to use the array convention.<\/li>\n
  4. Always specify a timeout value.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Here’s a few examples…<\/h3>\n

    Creating a symlink:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    <cfexecute name="\/usr\/bin\/ln" arguments="-s ""#myDir##myFilename#"" #symlinkDir#\/#symlinkFilename#" timeout="5" \/><\/pre>\n
    Creating a zipped tarball (data.tar.gz):<\/strong><\/p>\n
    In this example, I’m creating an array of arguments for both cfexecute tags, just because it looked cleaner.<\/p>\n
    \r\n<cfset tarArgs\u00a0 = [ "-cf", "#myDirectory#\/data.tar", "-C", "#directoryOfFilesToGet#", "." ] >\r\n<cfset gzipArgs = [ "#myDirectory#\/data.tar" ] >\r\n<cfexecute name="\/usr\/bin\/tar" arguments="#tarArgs#" timeout="60" \/>\r\n<cfexecute name="\/usr\/bin\/gzip" arguments="#gzipArgs#" timeout="60" \/>\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    Usually, I don’t have many issues that are unix-specific when working in ColdFusion. CFEXECUTE is one of those tags that is a little more, shall we say… annoying? It’s quite common to try and execute a command line in Unix and have no result and no errors. Here’s some tips that I’ve found helpful throughout […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blueradial.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}