My first one was a script I wrote straight out of a perl class that was geared for people who didn't know a damn thing about perl, a category I in which I fit quite well. It was a replacement for some web based tools that we used to look up accounts and such at the isp where I worked. The original one that someone wrote was a bourne shell script. Talk about slow.

So, there I was, throwing together a script that made Matt's scripts look quite conscienscious of security. brian d foy himself jeered me on the code I was using to parse a form, which I got from someone else, no clue where he had dug it up. HTML right in my code, lots of heredocs. 80 columns? HA! I have one line in there that was 560 characters long. Truly the Anti-Golf.

My "authentication" (I hate to sully the good name of authentication by calling it that) scheme was simply displaying certain menu items for certain people. Even at the time I knew that was a joke, but I didn't know any other way, I was just in a hurry to get it up and running. It did a lot of nifty things, but man, I cringe at the site of the code. It eventually grew to over 2000 lines as I added more and more features and stuff.

One of the funniest thing I did... I didn't know how to do much as far as outputting a bunch of matched text from a large list with multiple columns and sort it and all that. So I actually used the perl script to inhale the whole list into a temporary mysql database, and then just do a simple select out of there. Man, talk about killing a rabbit with an H-Bomb...

You can tell that I did eventually learn about localizing things because you can see some my statements in some of the subs. It's pretty sad overall. I just looked at it again, good gracious, I wish no one ever saw it. When they hired Kanji back where I used to work, one of my first thoughts when I found out was "OMG... he's going to see That Script™!"