conflist=`cat www-conf/* |sort -u |sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g'`
On first glance, it's getting cat'ing all the files in a dir, sorting, and returning the result. BUT WAIT, there's a funky sed script in there.
Sure, I get the 's/\n/ /g' -> get rid of intervening newlines. But what of the other stuff?
It turns out, some smart-ass decided to code up some fancy schmantzy "I'm Smarter Than You" thumb-to-nose action. How it works, courtesy of http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html :
- The semicolons separate commands.
- The :a is a tag, so we can 'goto a' later.
- The N command says append lines together including their newline character;
- The "n" command will print out the current pattern space (unless the "-n" flag is used), empty the current pattern space, and read in the next line of input. The "N" command does not print out the current pattern space and does not empty the pattern space. It reads in the next line, but appends a new line character along with the input line itself to the pattern space.
- the $!ba command says, 'unless you're the last line of the file, branch to a (goto a).
- An easier way is to use the special character "$," which means the last line in the file.
So, the goal was to collapse all this data into a sorted list without newlines. Note that if I echo $conflist, I see "a b c d e..." just like if I had left out those fancy branches.
What an utter waste of 10 minutes to figure this out, and another 10 to write this up for future reference and helping anyone else.
Questions:
- Will I ever use this construct? NO. I'll find some other way to do it. If I even need to, given Bash collapses things onto one line with an echo anyway.
- Do I actively dislike the person who wrote this? YES. I don't know who it was, specifically. But, it doesn't matter, I know what I need to know: He wasted my time, and was what I would consider the professional equivalent of a braggart. Code should be easy to read as a primary goal.
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