[plug] Self encrypting drives

[Brad Campbell]

On 01/02/17 22:26, David Godfrey wrote:
> Hi Brad,
>
>
> Sorry for the two errors, that's what comes of writing code without the
> required infrastructure to test it against :-)
> Having said that, I know the regex can't be inside single quotes, that
> was simply a slip of the fingers.
>
> The logic error on the other hand is unforgivable, it's damn obvious,
> and I would have caught it if I had done some tests, but was too lazy to
> whip up a test wrapper ;-)
>
> Glad to be able to throw some useful tips out there, I personally try to
> stick to pure bash where I can, piping stuff out to sed, grep, awk, cut,
> tr, etc only when speed is an issue (which isn't so common a problem),
> or when the quantity of code required to do it in bash gets excessive.
> The main reason for that is long term maintainability, doing it in bash
> is normally much easier to understand in 12 months time than some arcane
> sed, grep, awk invocation.
> I've seen regex's that use back references and other tricks that can
> take hours to unravel, and even longer to debug when you com back to
> them 12 months later.
> When they were written you go "Thats awesome, I've done something nearly
> impossible there" but in 12 months you curse yourself 6 ways from Sunday.

I've reached that point where my memory isn't as good as it used to be 
(42 & 2 kids under 3), so a couple of years ago I started leaving little 
text files all over the place with notes in them. My code is worse, but 
my documentation is better, so when I go back to something 2 years after 
the fact I can refer to the text file for the explanation as to what and 
why I did what I did. I've become particularly good at documenting any 
regex because now I tend to forget how it works a matter of days after I 
wrote it.

As for bash, I'm still learning about all the stuff it has built-in and 
I've been using it in anger since 1996. I still tend to lean on sed, 
grep & awk because that's how I started out and I've never really had 
the time to figure out a better way to skin the cat. A bit like I have 
thousands of lines of AutoLISP, and as it still works I've never 
bothered to learn about AutoCADs VBA or COM scripting interfaces.

Regards,
Brad