If it doesn’t look like line noise, you’re not using Unix right

Code so ugly it shouldn’t be allowed to live. Most of it isn’t even Perl.

Forgot to add ids to your form fields? Let vim(ex) take care of it.
:%s/name="([^"]*)”/name=”1″ id=”1″/g
We reimplemented ls in CSE30. Want to test that you recurse right?
ls -aR | grep -v :$ | grep -v '^.$' | grep -v '^..$' | sort
find -exec basename '{}' ';' | grep -v '^.$' | grep -v '^..$' | sort

As I come up with more examples, I’ll throw them in here. Maybe I’ll make it a page someday. I’m mostly doing this because I know it drives Paul up the wall ;)

2 Responses to “If it doesn’t look like line noise, you’re not using Unix right”

  1. Rick Auricchio says:

    Did you borrow the “line noise” description from me? The first time I saw C code in 1976, I said it looked like line noise. Naturally, you had to be accustomed to 300-baud modems to recognize the { } noise characters.

  2. jauricchio says:

    No, I actually borrowed it from popular descriptions of Perl; I’m sure it referred more to either a misconfigured home dialup modem, or the sound it produced, than the old dedicated lines.

    Did 300-baud modems have a propensity to produce curlies?

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