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What soothes your soul?

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  • DrHappyAngryDrHappyAngry Member Posts: 1,577
    tbone1 wrote: »
    Apparently grep, sed, awk, sort and split. Jebus I love old Unix tools.

    Thank the Unix Gods. I'll sacrifice a goat in your honor. Seriously, back in the '70s some dudes said we'll just make an OS that can deal with text and is built around it, and they're my heroes. All these tools still run on Linux today.

    They also run on OS X, which is built on an open source version of BSD Unix. (Back in 2002, the meme was "OS X. Because making Unix user-friendly is easier than making Windows secure and reliable.")

    And I agree with you. In a previously life, I wrote medical and pharmaceutical software that (as my boss said at the start of my interview) could kill 10,000 people a day. It was an Oracle shop running on Solaris and Linux. I once fixed a problem in forty minutes that the Oracle guys couldn't do in a month, thanks to a fgrep, cut, split, head, tail, and the korn shell's various IO redirects. It took three minutes to write, seven minutes to test and run, and thirty minutes to convince the Oracle guys that I did it that quickly.

    And I really wish I could tell you about some of the awesome stuff we did when I was involved with military software, but I have enough going on without Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones showing up at the door.

    Oh, I know about OS X's history. I prefer Ubuntu myself, plus it makes easier running the same OS that all the servers I manage are on. There are some differences, like OS X has BSD sed and Linux has GNU, so some things don't completely work the same.

    I've done some civilian work for the navy when I worked for a company that did physical security computers and related systems like 15 years ago. So I've actually had clearance to walk around some bases. It was funny, back then I had a really long pony tail. When my boss and I were unloading things from his car, a guard came over yelling at us "What the Hell are we doing here?" and had his hand on his weapon. With a big shit eating grin I hand him my badge and tell him "We're with XXXXX, we're here to set up your security system." He calmed down, but was clearly pissed he couldn't get into it with us.
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