Developer cleverly shrank 2,600 lines of C into a six-line script but still ending up losing sleep
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Tim" who told that while working for a phone company he once rewrote 2,650 lines of C as a six line shell script.
Key points
- The script worked fine, but the telco's networks didn't.
- But that colleague habitually left the pager at work, forgot to turn it on, or conveniently placed it out of earshot.
- "In those days, there was no Linux and AT&T had licensed the Unix source code to universities with the struct proviso that it never be made publicly available," Tim explained.
"It took me quite some time using WAIS to track it down – the security could have been better – and read the code." Having found what he needed, Tim wrote his script, which ran overnight to collect data from the telco's switches, tidied up the raw info, and uploaded it to a mainframe.
Additional details
- Which is why, each Friday, The Register runs a new instalment of On Call – the reader contributed column which ensures your work to keep tech alive doesn't remain unnoticed.
- He performed that feat after being asked to fix a data transfer program that, strangely, included a bespoke implementation of the venerable File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
- After two weeks of interrupted sleep, Tim's manager kindly told him to give the pager to a colleague.
- "It would automatically page me if it couldn't connect to a switch or mainframe after three attempts," he explained.
- To find the code he needed, Tim therefore used a Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) to search remote databases.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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