Fun with shell scripting

2004-04-30T13:06:11+00:00

I went a little nuts tonight with shell scripting. It started off with a few innocent bits of cat and grep piped together. But then I invited trouble started using sed. Pretty soon, I was bringing in cut and sort and uniq. I knew I was doomed when I made the whole mess start emailing me with sendmail.

Oh, but then I went completely off the deep end. I looked up RSS 3.0, since that's so much easier to generate on the fly. I started producing that with a little help from echo and awk. From there, I whipped up a quick v3.0 to v0.91 converter so I could get something my aggregator could understand.

It was all a very iterative process down a slippery slope of geekiness, and the resulting scripts are nothing that I'd've designed as such from scratch. But, one thing led to another, and now I've got a nightly report emailed to me of pages that have gone 404 and 500, and an RSS feed of referers to boot.

I'm sure it looks like completely braindead work, but it was fun!

Archived Comments

Micah
2004-04-30T09:21:59

Is "sort | uniq" the same as "sort -u" ? Uniq is cool, though, I'd never seen it before. And very nice scripts, it's (almost) always fun to read other peoples' code.
Donovan Preston
2004-04-30T12:01:48

Haha. RSS 3.0 is awesome. Nothing like a little almost-rfc822 to knock some sense into the blogging world. How long has it been around? I never notice these things, I don't pay any attention to any of the blog world bullshit. (Maybe I should.)
Mark
2004-04-30T19:32:43

> I don’t pay any attention to any of the blog world bullshit. (Maybe I should.) No! No, you shouldn't! Do not, under any circumstances, get sucked into that grungy, petty, venom-soaked little world! Anyone who knows what I'm talking about will back me up on this, including Les.

This is not my beautiful blog

2004-04-26T05:28:13+00:00

So. It's been awhile since I spent much time here actually writing. The quick links have been fun, but they're just not the same as really posting something of my own. There've been numerous reasons for my semi-disappearance, but I think I'd finally like to come back now. Maybe I'll even spend a few entries writing about what's happened over the past year or so. It's been a bit of a trip.

But first, I've got to get this new site launched. By the time you read this, there will have been some changes. It will have been a little over a year since the last time I did something drastic around here. In fact, I'd intended this to happen right around this site's birthday, but I think I needed to read Joel on Software on Perfectionism, and mamamusing's Talking Heads reference, to get me to finally bite the bullet and push the button.

There's bound to be bugs and problems galore here, but I've got to get past the tinkering and strip away my excuses for not actually writing here. I actually started putting this new site together back in early December, and have been putzing around since. Now that it's just about there, I realize I'm actually afraid to start writing again. (As if I were any sort of writer worth reading before. Bah. Get over it.)

Here it is, then. I'm back to using Movable Type, probably just in time to fuss about upgrading to 3.0. Nothing wrong with blosxom, or pyblosxom for that matter, but a confluence of available plugins, exasperation, and fiddling brought me back. I think the result's turned out rather nifty, so one of my first runs of entries will be a sort of colophon. Maybe someone else will find something worthwhile in that.

This time, I've gone from having a wiki and a blog to having a wiki, a blog, and a linkblog. (There've got to be better words for these things.) The links were mashed up with the rare blog entry, and I got more than one comment wishing they were separate. Makes sense to me. So... three separate parts to this site, each separate for a reason, but all intermingled too.

Anyway, before I ramble on too much longer about an idea which might just be NeatLikeDigitalWatches instead of actually neat, I should get this thing launched and start using it...

Archived Comments

Buzz Andersen
2004-04-26T02:40:22

Welcome back--good to hear from you!
George Hotelling
2004-04-26T02:43:54

As Rands said[1], "better is the enemy of done." Glad to see you've finally launched! 1: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2004/04/19/heinous.html
Mad William Flint
2004-04-26T04:06:32

it's about friggin time. :-P
Stefan Tilkov
2004-04-26T11:10:04

Even the links were good, but this is great. Glad I stayed subscribed.
Pete Prodoehl
2004-04-26T19:17:49

Finally! Welcome back... Now get writing!
Pete Prodoehl
2004-04-26T19:21:19

The Wiki might need some work still... I'm trying to edit my page with no luck, and got at least one blank page in the process.
Gnomon
2004-04-26T19:50:00

Welcome back, Les! I'm looking forward to the pleasure of reading you more often, and discovering the reasons for your absence!
Donovan Preston
2004-04-26T22:20:16

Oh, but it is your blog, and it is beautiful. Good work. Also, can the picture of your c64 be a link to a bigger version of it? We really want to be able to see good detail of the sheer joy of getting a c64 for christmas.
jcwinnie
2004-04-27T01:53:30

FYI. Bloglines still says your RSS bad.
Jeremy Dunck
2004-04-27T18:19:28

This returns 404: http://www.decafbad.com/blog/ Ouch!
Michael Froomkin
2004-04-27T20:18:56

Your rss feeds don't seem to exist? http://www.decafbad.com/index.rdf and the atom version both return "not found"...
Meri
2004-05-01T19:27:40

Nice to see you writing again and nice new design -- my one question would be are you pinging blo.gs when you update your links as well as the blog? Might you consider a separate ping like mezzoblue and kottke tend to do? I really enjoyed your links section when it was part of the blog...

0xDECAFBAD - Tag: colophon

Fun with shell scripting

Archived Comments

This is not my beautiful blog

Archived Comments