Learning Sed or Using Claude? | Hacker News Reader

Learning Sed or Using Claude?

playtechnique.io

In the beginning, there were no "blocks" to build with, so we coded everything in its entirety. Then came a higher order language, and a third and then fourth generation language.

But at each step, some very basic concepts were needed to work with the new "blocks". I'll give a non-trivial example. Working on a network monitoring system, we had alerts to deal with coming from SNMP. They had to be processed in order to give clear and actionable status.

So, whatever results come from the newest black box, they need to be processed at a high level in order to do more than inform you of the daily horoscope or whatever.

The particular software we used evolved from netlabs and we wrote custom handlers in perl, which Larry Wall invented for exactly that purpose if my history is right.

At one point, I read "Unix Text Processing" not so much for the troff lessons, but for all the working examples of shell commands. That helped me enormously in my work.

And you can get the book.

https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing

https://ia800506.us.archive.org/12/items/utp_book/utp_book.p...

I’ve been reading the 1977 Bell Labs Journal that collected everything written about UNIX up to that point. Seeing how much of its history was intimately tied to text processing and document layout was really mind-bending. I’d always assumed writing programs was Good Enough, but it was only once Unix started being used for real business at AT&T by laying out patent filing documentation that they got money for the PDP-11, which turned out to be a very important development.

It’s in reading that stuff that I grew To appreciate troff, nroff and the whole runoff family, and how CTSS was really astonishingly influential.

We had DWB (Documenters Work Bench) troff at one job. It was astounding. We were collecting test data, so I would run the data (with some sed and other filtering) into grap and pic, and incorporate the results into the weekly report.

Naturally, new or revised data would just mean running a Makefile. I had my reports ready in a couple of days while people would click away for a week or so.

It was a blast. On the other side of the coin, I did use some of the early page layout programs (so early that I forgot their names) and got involved with a friend in making "rebus" fonts (with Fontographer).

I mentioned elsewhere that I made some quicky Hypercard stacks that kicked out PostScript. Those were it's all PostScript days. I had the stacks write out text and graphics using the "Illustrator 3" shorthand, easy to write, that became full on PostScript with the addition of the headers.

The above were all at the same job, or during the time there.

I've never even _heard_ of Documenters Work Bench. Looks like it cost about 2 thousand in the late 80s - https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/licen...

Any chance you've got any other older unix nuggets that come to mind?

Author here. I don't know if we'll be writing shell scripts in five years for our jobs, but I do know that spending a few minutes writing sed makes me feel connected to my tribe of linuxy people with a love of unix history.

I also know that thinking about pattern matching is fun, it's a little puzzle solved with a skillset that transfers to other cli tools.

Post also opens with a classic interview question I've used for years: no ls on the box, five ways to list the directory tree you're in. A handful of answers at the bottom :)

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