It’s a way bigger pain in the ass than people think it is. I remember having to parse output from a tool for work that had tons of output in tabular format, mixed with normal sentence like strings. JSON, YAML, or XML outputs weren’t available so I had to do a nasty mess of grep, awk, cut, and head/tail, to get what I wanted. My first attempt was literally counting the characters so I could cut out exactly what I needed, but as we all know, hardcoding values is a recipe for headaches later on.
Here’s a horror story from literally yesterday. We have been fighting a system for a client for weeks and it has been a nightmare. Our clients just told us that they outsourced some of their work to an Indian outfit but that outfit is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn’t know how to edit text files so they have been downloading the files to their Windows machines, editing them in Windows, then uploading the contaminated text files back into Linux. None of them, not our client nor the outfit they hired, understood why this was a problem. We have no idea what files are affected and we won’t know until they fail because they obviously did not keep track of what they touched.
It’s a way bigger pain in the ass than people think it is. I remember having to parse output from a tool for work that had tons of output in tabular format, mixed with normal sentence like strings. JSON, YAML, or XML outputs weren’t available so I had to do a nasty mess of grep, awk, cut, and head/tail, to get what I wanted. My first attempt was literally counting the characters so I could cut out exactly what I needed, but as we all know, hardcoding values is a recipe for headaches later on.
Here’s a horror story from literally yesterday. We have been fighting a system for a client for weeks and it has been a nightmare. Our clients just told us that they outsourced some of their work to an Indian outfit but that outfit is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn’t know how to edit text files so they have been downloading the files to their Windows machines, editing them in Windows, then uploading the contaminated text files back into Linux. None of them, not our client nor the outfit they hired, understood why this was a problem. We have no idea what files are affected and we won’t know until they fail because they obviously did not keep track of what they touched.
EDIT: I’m being intentionally vague.