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I have a tool that I wrote, probably 5+ years ago. Runs once a week, collects data from a public API, translates it into files usable by the asterisk phone server.
I totally forgot about it. Checked. Yep, up to date files created, all seem in the right format.
Sometimes things just keep working.
Meanwhile, had to debug a script that zipped a zip recursively, with the new data appended. The server had barely enough storage left, as the zip took almost 200GB (the data is only 3GB). I looked at the logs, last successful run: 2019
Yes, had the same happen. Something that should be simple failing for stupid reasons.
Well it's not that simple... Because whoever wrote that made it way too complicated (and the production version has been tweaked without updating the dev too)
A clean rewrite with some guard clauses helped remove the haduken ifs and actually zipping the file outside of the zipped directory helped a lot
I mean, I have to say I've hastened my own demise (in program terms) by over-engineering something that should be simple. Sometimes adding protective guardrails actually causes errors when something changes.
Which are what guardrails are for. When something change, you don't know the impact the change will have.
By having guardrails, you make sure to limit/eliminate potential critical issues.
Yeah, all these simple data processing scripts will always work as long as both sides stay the same/compatible
Yep. It seems they haven't changed a thing about the format. Probably a script much older than mine on their end is generating it too.
Isn't that true for all of data processing?
Maybe. But webdevs have made it a mission not to seem like so
I don't see the alias in your .bashrc
yeah, um, about that. I have no idea where it comes from. We can type alias and see what it is, so if it's ever lost, we can recreate it, but I looked for 30 minutes yesterday even did a grep -R and I have NO IDEA where it comes from, or why it's named electricboogaloo
the final part of that is "written by person that left the company ten years ago"
My current project has a crontab with 216 entries.
Well, here's a sentence I haven't been tempted to use before:
"I believe that may be too many crontab entries."
Any problem in server administration can be solved with an additional crontab entry. Except for the problem of too many crontab entries.
Which can be solved by an additional server.
Boom, problem solved.
And that's why I added a crontab entry that periodically purges my cron configuration. That way, I'm forced to readd only the truly necessary cron jobs, successfully reducing the amount of crontab entries.
just randomly delete 50 of them.
Yes. The strongest crontab entries will probably restore themselves. (For anyone reading along, this is sarcasm. Don't do this.)
a crontab can regenerate from bisection to form two whole crontabs
Use SystemD timers, you animal
At some point it may be good to migrate to airflow or something similar.
It's not the number of entries that makes it bad. It's the fact that if you run crontab, they are gone...
That's why there's a crontab rule to load the crontab from a file. Cronception if you will.
Make the rule start a secondary cron system. Otherwise it won't run after you erase the crontab.
Here you go:
with-lock-ex -q /path/to/lockfile sh -c '
while true; do
crontab cronfile;
sleep 60;
done;'
At first I thought you missed the -r. Then I checked. Defaulting to STDIN here is very, very dumb, IMHO. Almost as bad as putting the “edit” flag right next to the “delete everything without confirmation” flag on a Western keyboard (-e vs -r).
Crontab is a really badly designed program that we just can't fix because everybody depends on its WFTs for something.
Nah bro, that bash alias is FULLY documented in .bashrc! Idiot.
OK, I got called out
Ha, loser.
*glances over at 6 bash scripts and 2 cron jobs*
Not you, you're perfect
Suck my dick O’Leary
A self-written shell script "daemon" that tails & greps log output for "ERR|FAIL"
Oh man, you guys should see what I was cooking up at my old place.
Head office too shitty to give us an actual asset management solution, but we did have full access to the Microsoft suite, so i used a SharePoint lists as databases, powerapps apps running on iPads for all the data entry ux and then like two dozen hacked together power automate flows linking them all together as well as taking any Info out of the actual IT systems head office used and since we didn't have API access to those system any data feeding back in to them would be in the form of automated emails that the poor 1st line techs in head office would have to sort through and process manually.
I know there's a meme here, but as a Canadian, I'm sorry about that traitorous asshat.
I'll hear NO aspersions against my precious Cron!
Cron is magic. Cron is civilization!
Naw, mate, that's Crom.
Since I'm somewhat of a simpleton... isn't that how pipelines actually work? The only difference being, they're all (scripts) available from a centralized system and triggered i.e. with webhooks?
Instead of a local script on a server, the system opens i.e. a ssh session and runs the script step by step remotely?
So is that the joke or am I missing something?
Pipelines are meant to be versioned an replicable, as opposed to a hack job that only runs on a forgotten server in someone's closet depicted in the meme.
I feel attacked
