

What problem did your first script solve? - mariusbutuc

Today I wrote my first (trivial, but "real") bash script... 10 years after studying linux scripting in university: https://gist.github.com/3714934&#60;p&#62;Do you remember what was the first problem you scripted your way out of or how long after you learnt your first scripting language?
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unimpressive
I don't remember my first script. Though I _do_ remember the most value I've
ever gotten out of a script.

To set the scene, I had a high school science class, and in it you were
supposed to do journal entries. (Read: Notes.) You kept track of all your
notes and put them in a table of contents. The instructor kept all the notes
on his website. It was the night before the last day of school. Or the night
before that. I hadn't turned in my organized notes, and thus had a C in the
class. I needed them turned in yesterday.

So what I did was:

1\. Download the powerpoint of all the notes.

2\. Use libreoffice to convert it to pdf.

3\. Used less to read the data from the pdf into text.

4\. Used sed to remove the garbage characters from the text.

5\. The file had uniform formatting, so I went over it with sed again to turn
it into an HTML file.

6\. Went over the HTML file by hand to correct anomalies and fill in answers
to questions. (This was the 'real' assignment, fill in various questions
throughout the notes.)

7\. Wrote out an table of contents. (Which in retrospect could have been done
with a sed script.)

8\. Turned the whole thing in.

He never actually read it (As it was quite apparent from a glance that I had
done it.), but I got an A in the class; and a night of no sleep.

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dariot
It was a script for invoking a C program stored in all of the machines forming
a cluster of 16: the whole point of the thing was to generate traffic between
the PCs in a structured fashion, measuring the bandwidth and latency results.

