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mkphlog v0.3 and bug wrangling |
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Wednesday, Jan 18 04:34:03 pm, 2012 |
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This weekend, chals emailed me with a bug in the new mkphlog. For s |
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odd reason, it would only automatically add 7 posts to the main phl |
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listing before failing miserably to write the new posts to the list |
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Now, the the easy thing would be to disable that function with the |
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boolean variable provided in the new version of mkphlog. But I want |
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fix the script, so I had to do some light debugging. However, what |
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found was interesting. |
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[Skip the next 3 paragraphs if you don't want to hear the gory, |
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slightly dramatized details] |
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The mistake I made is that I made an assumption in writing the orig |
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script. For those not really into programming, _never_ make |
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assumptions. Sometimes you're right, but when you're wrong, you're |
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scratching your head in confusion. The assumption I made was that t |
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output of `wc -l` is always the same. It isn't, especially on NetBS |
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(SDF's operating system), but what's worse is that it isn't standar |
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across platform. (The wc on Slackware doesn't output the same thing |
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the wc on NetBSD). |
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The problem with this is that the program would work fine on NetBSD |
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until a certain line number was reached (10, or anything above one |
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digit). Then cut, when trying to split the output into a set number |
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of fields with a space character as a deliminator, would be one |
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field off and extract sweet nothing from the `wc -l` output. |
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It didn't even work at all on Slackware where there is no odd |
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formatting at the beginning. Which led me to fix the whole issue |
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with a few simple sed substitutions; just get rid of everything |
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that I don't want until there is nothing left but the line count. |
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Let this be a lesson. Be careful how you program :) and don't make |
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assumptions. That would be a good start. And above all else, have f |
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coding. |
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Download mkphlog v0.3 here |
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