On Wed, 8 May 2013, Mark McCullough wrote: > (I believe that dealing with multiple Unix like OSs teaches you more about the tools you have much more reliably, > like awk and sed and you end up needing the fancy and more trouble-prone tools less.)
Ha. Awk seems trouble free until you are trying to herd a recalcitrant bunch of developers in a migration from Tru64 to a Solaris, where the migration includes a tangle of application scripts that were: written by long-gone consultants 15 years previous; held together by duct-tape, baling wire and blood sacrifices; and where some interesting choices were made by said consultants in writing the scripts in the first place - such as the mail reader program they provided which ran the command "view /usr/spool/mail/<account_name>". At which point I had to deal with the panicky "I left testing the dev environment to the day before going on vacation and OMG it has to work NOW" developer who came to my office yelling that that the unix was completely broken, and how hard was it for us to copy their scripts properly, etc. It turned out that by "the unix is broken", what they meant was "my scripts are giving weird results and the mail-reading program doesn't work but I don't know how to troubleshoot them because they've just automagically worked for 15 years" , and the main thing that was failing in the scripts was awk and a couple of other utilities. Fortunately I didn't have to wade through their code (required a will save at a -20 penalty to not lose sanity points) to point them at /usr/xpg4/bin/awk and at /usr/xpg4/bin and /usr/ucb/bin generally for the other utilities which differed in terms of flags between Tru64 and Solaris. The "mail reader" I fixed by symlinking /var/spool/mail to /usr/spool/mail to /usr/mail to /var/mail after a couple of failed attempts to switch the developers to an actual mail reader. Because sometimes it really is easier just to roll with the flow. While *facepalm*ing. And ordering a stiff drink. This was a couple of jobs ago, but I still have "fond" memories of the mail reader. Jessica _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
