Working with Bash is Really Quite Fun
I know the Code Monkeys hate it, but bash is a really great little tool. It's on every box, it's got all kinds of capabilities, and it's simple to use. Now it's a slightly different syntax than Ruby, so I'm sure that has something to do with it's distaste with the kids, but that's their issue, not mine.
This morning I was having a little fun creating summary scripts for the two other processes we run as part of the nightly batch runs. They are also ruby processes, but the other guys haven't taken the time -- OK, who am I kidding? I wrote the only summary script there is, and I just hadn't gotten around to writing them for the other two processes.
One other teammate talked about doing it, but I know he'd have written it in ruby, and then tossed out what I had, and I wasn't about to let that happen. So I took the existing code and simply added parsers for the three files, and allowed the script to tell - based on the file name or a "forcing argument", which of the three parsers to use.
Pretty nice. Very clean, and it's one simple file.
It's probably not 100% complete at this point, but it's a great start, and it's able to point out when things have gone really wrong.