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Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort?

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In article <106b8gk$2rau6$1@dont-email.me>, address@is.invalid says...
>
>Knuttle,
>
>> It is amazing what you can do with the old Dos Batch file commands.
>
...
>That makes me remember this story :
>
>https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-The-Indexer
>

You could do even more with Unix shell-scripting - presumably still 
availablein Linux, and something similar's available with PowerShell 
(never learned either as it happens).

Years ago (mid- 90s) the head of my department called me into his 
office.  Had a project for me, likely to last 6m or so.  He described it 
- a way of grooming a live feed so that stats could be displayed on one 
of these new-fangled "web pages".  Realisation dawned as he spoke.  I 
asked if I could come back to him in an hour's time.  He was puzzled, 
but agreed.

An hour later I explained that I'd assembled a series of shell-script 
fragments that I'd been gradually accumulating over the last year into a 
utility that would do exactly what he wanted, crucially using the 
relational "JOIN" script command.  It would need a little tidying up in 
terms of the exact display, but it was working.  Right now, at my desk 
upstairs.

He just didn't get it.  He said he would "drop by" and take a look, but 
he never did.  And a week later, one of my colleagues was given the same 
project.  He was still trying to write C++ code six months later.  Yet 
within an hour of being asked, I'd had a working prototype running on my 
screen.  Didn't do me any good, actually.  That was meant to be a plum 
project, and I was overlooked after that.  (I left.)

In another role, I'd come in one morning to find my then boss sizzling 
over his keyboard.  He'd been given a large (!) file of data including a 
"code" for a location in a vast network.  Unfortunately the other data 
that was to be used had the code formatted very slightly differently - 
the human eye could make the translation trivially, but matching it 
electronically was impossible, it seemed.  He'd come in just after dawn 
and had been working in a text editor manually changing the codes for 
two hours by the time I arrived.  The progress indicator still showed 
0%.

"Would you like me to do that for you?" I asked.  He practically kicked 
his chair down the hall.  I got him to explain the exact naming 
convention, and spent ten minutes studying both files of data, and 
writing a shell "pipeline" using "SED", the only utility capable both of 
"regular expressions" and handling a file of arbitrary size.  I closed 
his edit session (cheekily telling it not to bother saving changes) and 
ran my script.  It ran for ten minutes, and fixed every single code.

Then there was the project based on an object-oriented database (which 
didn't seem to work after a month's hard work on it) which I replaced 
with a shell-script I'd written in two hours for a customer demo which 
had been sprung on me at 24 hours' notice.  My then boss subsequently 
went off into rhetorical flights about how this COULD NOT HAVE BEEN 
ACHIEVED in just one month without using "advanced programming 
techniques" like the latest object-oriented database.  I only told him 
afterwards.

DOS scripting never had the power or fluency of Unix shell-scripting, 
but although I find the "look" of PowerShell rather off-putting I think 
it very likely that PS could do all this - it's just a shame I've never 
had any reason to learn it.  But if you're a Linux user, check to see if 
SED and AWK and JOIN (etc) are still available.  If so, you're sitting 
on some real data processing power there.

--
Phil, London

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Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-07-28 18:18 +0100
  Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-07-28 19:10 +0100
    Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-28 22:18 +0200
      Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-07-29 01:37 +0100
        Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-29 09:10 +0200
          Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-07-29 18:46 +0100
            Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? knuttle <keith_nuttle@yahoo.com> - 2025-07-29 13:58 -0400
            Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-29 20:21 +0200
              Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? knuttle <keith_nuttle@yahoo.com> - 2025-07-29 15:20 -0400
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-29 21:47 +0200
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-07-29 22:38 +0100
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-30 08:57 +0200
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-29 22:02 -0400
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-30 09:54 +0200
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? Philip Herlihy <nothing@invalid.com> - 2025-07-30 14:24 +0100
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-30 09:55 -0400
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? knuttle <keith_nuttle@yahoo.com> - 2025-07-30 13:44 -0400
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-30 23:33 -0400
        Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-29 10:03 +0200
          Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-29 10:15 +0200
          Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-07-29 22:51 +0100
            Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-30 09:42 +0200
              Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-30 10:02 -0400
                Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> - 2025-07-30 17:04 +0200
              Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-07-30 21:49 +0100
            Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? Mark Lloyd <not.email@all.invalid> - 2025-07-30 18:15 +0000
              Re: Creating new files of indeterminate sort? Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-30 23:37 -0400

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