How to find out where a class is being loaded from

Sometimes you are interested in knowing where your code is getting a certain class from. Knowing this helps you with resolving conflicts.

Let's say in our ClassA, we are calling a certain API from ClassB, and that API is not functioning as we expect. We are interested to see which jar file ClassB is loaded from. To do this add the following line to you code and inspect or print the value of the returned string.

String mysteriousPath = ClassA.class.getResource("ClassB.class").openConnection().getURL().toString();

Useful shell commands

List only the dot files, and tell ls not to see through directories:

• ls -d .*

How to run a command on a filtered file list returned by grep

I often find myself passing a file list returned by some linux command to grep for filtering like below :

ls *.jar | grep test 

Sometimes i like to run a certain command on these filtered results. I achieve this by :

ls *.jar | grep test | while read line; do sha1sum "$line"; done

The generic form is :

<command generating a file list>   |   grep <filter keyword> | while read line; do <command> "$line"; done  

How to check if a port is open on Linux

Sometimes when writing a script/program you need to know if a port your are interested in has an established connection to it or it's free.

My favorite way to do this is to run the following command ( replace PORT with the port number you want to check for ):

netstat -ln | grep :PORT

-l = Show only listening ports

-n = Show port number

 If this command doesn't return anything, it shows that your PORT is available to use.
In your script you can check $? to see the return code of the above command. If it's non-zero, the PORT is available.

One thing to note though is that, this doesn't tell you the status of your network e.g. if PORT is accessible from outside of your notwork.

How to generate a sql script that drops all tables starting with a certain prefix

In some circumstances, you may want to drop all tables in a schema that start with certain prefix. Say for example you like drop all tables starting with the prefix 'TMP_'.

You can execute:

BEGIN
  FOR t IN ( SELECT table_name FROM user_tables WHERE table_name LIKE 'TMP_%' )
  LOOP
    EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'DROP TABLE ' || t.table_name || ' CASCADE CONSTRAINTS';
  END LOOP;
END;

This block finds and drops all tables whose name start with 'TMP_'.

Another way is to first generate a list of drop statements, save the list as a sql script and finally execute it. Personally I like this way better since it lets me to see and be sure exactly what is going to be removed.

This block generates a list of drop statements for all tables in your schema starting with 'TMP_' :

select 'drop table ' || table_name || ' cascade constraints' || ';'
from   user_tables
where  table_name like 'TMP_%';

You can then take this generated list, save it as a sql script and execute it as you wish.