This little tool is pretty useful for administrators who wear the hat of both system admin and DBA on Linux/MySQL boxes. I wrote it as kind of a joke for our Perl developers, but now I use it just about every day for everything from at prompt hackups to full on table space utilization monitoring scripts.

The snippet has the library script that you can source into scripts that actually do work, as well as a script that uses the functions in the libraries. Anyone who has used the C API should be able to relate to using this script.

It's pretty fast and lightweight. It makes only one external call to mysql and sed per query. The rest is all bash builtins. Requires bash > 3.0

This function returns a Date object being set at 12 A.M. It is useful for comparing dates where you don't know if they'll come set at the beginning of the day or not.