Using curl to POST data

I wanted to automate some load testing at work, this required sending some post requests to a running server in order to increase the amount of 'work' being done. I wanted to use 'curl' as it's a linux command line app and so very easy to incorporate in a script.

Anyway, this is how you post data with curl:

curl -d "param1=value1¶m2=value2" http://myhost.com/server.cgi

Inserting binary values in the mysql shell

I needed to insert some dummy values into a table which had a bit field as well as a blob field, both of which are "NOT NULL". You just need to have the 'b' prefix on the data, like so:

INSERT INTO faketable(blob1, name, bitfield) values(b'001011101', "Beeblebrox", b'1');

You can also print out the binary data in a way that's not going to ruin your terminal using the BIN(), OCT() and HEX() functions:

SELECT name, HEX(blob1), BIN(bitfield) from faketable;
+--------------------+--------------+----------------+
| name               | HEX(blob1) | BIN(bitfield) |
+--------------------+--------------+----------------+
| Beeblebrox         | 005D         | 1              | 
+--------------------+--------------+----------------+