I'm a consultant. I often talk to people and offer to write scripts for them. It has never yet been an issue. 9 times out of 10, they simply want output parsed and placed into one of the products my company sells or somehow combined with other information to make the output more informative. Week before last, someone asked if I could take the output of something they have and put it into our product. "No problem" quoth I. "What is it you have?" "A perl script," they replied. Of course, I said I'd just re-write it and make it output the way we discussed.

Wow. All I can say was wow. Never before had I seen such a beast as this. To pull apart a file, they have used a `` call to cat with five pipes through grep. They dump this into a plain array. That's just how it starts. I count 35 system pipes through the whole script. I shudder to think how long this must take to run. I had to read through it 7 or 8 times just to understand it. Basically, it appears to be written by somene reasonably proficcient in Unix, but either just learning or not knowing perl.

All I can say is always ask to see the script you think you can re-write in seconds before you offer - else be stuck like me spending Sunday picking it apart with forceps just to see where all the parts are...

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