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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Over-Elaborate Shell Scripting
Date: 13 Mar 2026 19:33:14 GMT
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On Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:32:12 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> It's very hard to documents a regexp . Or in fact a complex SQL
> statement.
> And in the latter case I replaced a complex SQL statement by a series of
> simple statements and some C and the program ran at least 10 times
> faster.
> (I never found out how long the SQL version ran because I aborted it
> after 6 hours. The C example ran and gave me debugging output, and once
> I had fined tuned it, it took about 40 minutes )

We had one support person who spent his spare time crafting SQL 
statements. They would fail on older DB2 systems that had a 4K limit on a 
statement size.  The best part is with a chain of 
CONCAT(CONCAT(CONCAT(....  when a SUBSTR or something fails the whole mess 
returns NULL.