Food, Wine, Football....and PERL?

After taking a long (and much needed) week off......wait, who am I kidding? Even over the course of being gone for an entire week for Thanksgiving, between family, football, great food, and even better wine, I still found time to dig into PERL. In hopes of reaching my end-of-the-semester goal of creating a final script that can parse through Stephanie's (extremely) large log/parse files, and finally running a full-on analysis of our systems, I downloaded Putty on my home PC and got straight to work after a (massive) Thanksgiving dinner. Did I mention we had one Thursday AND Friday? Jealous, I know.

In taking a step back from my previous statement, the script is actually complete. However, it is most definitely a "brute force" script, as we say in programming. In English, I took a much longer route with much more coding in order to complete the script. But, as with all things, there exists a much more efficient way for the code to work through itself. The current script, as it stands, opens and closes each of the 3 files for every iteration (aka run through) of the program, thereby extending the run-time of the program exponentially. Though with my test files it is approximately only a 10 minute wait on the run-time, if I were to attempt to run any of Stephanie's logs it certainly would take a few hours, at least. In other words, there is still some progress to be made. My next step as of now it to modify the script to, instead, open each of the files once and simply iterate through the lines repeatedly to find matching time stamps, rather than opening and closing each file every time. I'll be crying tears of thanks, metaphorically, when this script is all said and done.

But, on that note, what are you thankful for? I had plenty of things to be for over the past week: Family, friends, LOTS of football, food, wine, and a somewhat of a break in general from life. But, it didn't occur to me until the end of it that having the opportunity to learn PERL was also something I should be thankful for. I've mentioned it before, but it has been a welcoming opportunity to learn a new language that I thought I might be otherwise incapable of without CREU. So, in closing, thank you CREU and happy holidays to everyone - Cheers!