Bash bashing escaped newlines (Was: LOL++ (Re: OT: It's arrived!))

[David Dorward]

On 9 Nov 2007, at 11:45, Bruce Richardson wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 11:16:13AM -0000, ti at lemonia.org wrote:
>>
>> If only there were a more powerful scripting language, that was more
>> reliably compatible between different platforms...
>
> You're right!  I know that some regulars on this list have worked at
> places where PHP was used for shell scripting and cron jobs.

I got to work with a lovely collection of shell scripts one. A Perl  
script would either parse some CSV (using regexes, not a module), or  
run some Java that would convert an Excel file to CSV and pipe it  
into a scalar for parsing. Then it would reorder the columns based on  
a config file (different clients would provide data in different  
formats) before outputting it as CSV to stdio. This got piped into a  
PHP script which parsed the CSV and then inserted it into a database.  
(Complicating efforts to simplify things - the server was on the  
other side of the world, had the RPM database borked by someone  
forcing uninstalls of packages, and didn't have DBI or a C compiler  
installed).

... it was an interesting job.

-- 
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/
http://blog.dorward.me.uk/