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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Perl is the undisputed god of text processing and manipulation. Most of the "IT related tasks" are essentially "Get the output, understand what it means, and act upon it", which makes Perl a perfect fit for the situation.

You can convert an IP to its hex representation and change a symlink in one line. That's a superpower.

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Sounds more like something that is difficult to read/understand. Code readability, being able to understand code 6 months from now is much more important to me.

Cramming things in one line can sometimes be neat but Perl took that concept and went bananas, and now Perl has because the punchline to many jokes, justified or not.

If the joke fits in one line, there is nothing to justify, no paragraphs.

Well, the exact code is as follows:

    $hexip = sprintf("%02X%02X%02X%02X",split('\.',$ip));
    system ("cd <REDACTED_PATH>; ln -fs $boothd $hexip");

That's all.

I think, in this case, perl being hard to understand is the joke itself.

What happens if `boothd` contains a space? or a semicolon? or any character the shell might interpret?

It’s a static variable in our case. Hence when the code runs once, it runs forever.

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