Three pieces of advice: One: Remember the Kübler-Ross model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Two: SQL is going to be a part of Information technology for a long time. Three: It's always the middle of the story.
chris On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 1:17 AM, Sami Joseph <sami.jos...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > I am interested to understand what this guy did, but i am unable to, can > someone please break it down to a newbie > > I've spent the last several days at work, trying to "take over" some work > left behind by a departing colleague. I realized we didn't have some of his > bash scripting in ansible or in a repo, so I decided this would be a good > opportunity to fix all of those problems. After a little while it became > clear his script was a set of functions, run in a loop-within-a-loop to > iterate through a bunch of things. In the middle, between these two loops, > is a pile of inline *PERL* that runs as a bash function and passes data > back and forth in all directions. This Perl generates some dynamic SQL > commands each loop. > > I hate SQL. > > Okay... read the Perl. Now, it's been a long time and a long way since my > last string of PERLs, so i didn't really grok 100% what I was reading, but > I got the gist of it. Finally figured out the SQL wasn't the problem. > > Another day goes by, and I finally figure out his code is self > documenting! That was what all the little bits were in the perl I didnt > get. PerlPod. So now I can figure this out easy . Run it, read the code, > make a change, run it... *boom* what? > > Nope. > > It took me several more hours and a few beer, and it finally clicked. He > was using PerlPod to document out the code he didn't want to run, and > commented out the documenting code to run the code he wanted. What looked > commented out, wasn't, and what looked like a pile of variables being set, > was just a bunch of commentary. He was using a documentation module for > *flow control*. > > What a Hacker. Holy shit. Blew. My. Mind. > > I just got schooled very seriously. It's nice to know I can still improve > *that much*, even from where I am. > > > When PerlPod is used to document something, anything between control codes > is not interpreted but treated as commented text. He would comment out the > control codes (thus rendering the text interpretable) on the parts meant to > run, which would differ between machines. > >
