deleting or moving pages (was:Re: [Pmwiki-users] Creating Groups)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Wed Jan 19 07:27:38 CST 2005


On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 09:06:23AM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> Questions about deleting pages or moving them.
> 
> When I use the "delete" procedure, I find that the pages are not actually 
> deleted, but they are renamed with a long string of digits at the end.
> 
> 1) What do these numbers mean?
> 2) Are they an encoded date?

They're just a timestamp, to make sure that someone can't completely
destroy the page's contents by just deleting the page more than once.
(For those who are curious, the timestamp is the number of seconds since
Jan 1 1970 00:00 UTC -- this is how many software libraries manage
dates and times.)

> 3) Can I simply delete the files from wiki.d/ if I no longer want them?

Yes.

> Note that I see great value in *not* really deleting the files. If a vandal 
> decided to delete a page, it would still be there.

Yes, this is exactly why PmWiki does a file rename rather than
actually deleting the files.

> 4) Can I recover a deleted page by simply truncating the name back to its 
> original?

Yes.

> I have moved pages between wikis by simply moving the files in wiki.d/. 
> This seems to work.
> 5) Does this kind of move create any problems?

Not really.  Some really old versions of PmWiki (<0.6) sometimes had
trouble with file permissions of copied wiki.d/ files, but this
has been pretty well fixed in 2.0.

> I have moved pages between groups by simply changing the file names.
> 6) Does this kind of move create any problems?

Not beyond what you would normally expect (e.g., the page no longer
appearing in its previous location).  At any rate, PmWiki itself doesn't 
have a problem with page files being renamed.

Pm



More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list