Convert string format to date format in MySQL

I was lazy to do conversion from a source to MySQL database record, thus it is in original format, stored as string. E.g : Aug 23 2010 07:00PM

Later, after a long while, I was requested to sort the query output from MySQL database, sort by the date! It is too late to do conversion, and repopulate the table, so... I found this : str_to_date.

str_to_date(`date_str`, '%b %d %Y %h:%i%p')

Example usage :

SELECT str_to_date ('Aug 23 2010 07:00PM', '%b %d %Y %h:%i%p') as date

It will return you this :

2010-08-23 19:00:00

Then you can sort the date accordingly. :)

ORDER BY str_to_date(`date_str`, '%b %d %Y %h:%i%p')

For the specifier, you can refer to http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/date-and-time-functions.html#function_date-format

Path comparison check in Perl

Problem statement : Checking 2 paths if they are from the same path.

In UNIX, we sometimes have softlinks to path. This has caused the path checking using pattern mathching is insufficient.

After much workarounds in my codes, finally, I found this. I just get the absolute path from the 2 given paths, then make comparison.

use Cwd 'abs_path';

if (abs_path($path1) eq abs_path($path2)) {
...
...
}

:)