More Reasons to Love Unix/Linux

I did a lot of clean-up work at radically changing the layout. Some of that was quick and simple do do, but for older pages I needed to do some hand editing before switching to the new format. As I was working on that, I remember wondering how on earth I would ever have been able to do it if I ran this site on a Microsoft server. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, of course, just that it would have taken longer and would have been more frustrating. It is true that I could use Perl or some other Windows available scripting language, or have installed MKS Toolkit, but sheesh: why pretend when you can have the real thing? Of course I did use Perl for a lot of it. For example, this simple script did a lot of the necessary work: #!/usr/bin/perl $file=shift @ARGV; print "$file "; open(F,"$file") or die "$!"; @lines=; open(F,">$file") or die "$!";    foreach (@lines) {     s/xmlheader"/xmlheader2"/;     s/div id="page"/div id="doc3"/;     s/onepage.pl/newpage.pl/;     print F $_ ;     } But that wasn't enough to handle everything. Some of the rest I did with other Perl scripts, some with sed, grep and the other usual Unix tools. Here's a little one liner I found very handy for showing me what I still needed to work on: grep -L "$1" *.html Basically that quickly shows you the files that do NOT contain whatever pattern you give it. If you are working on a very old system without -L, this script will do a similar job: grep -l "$1" *.html >~/a ls *.html > ~/b diff ~/a ~/b | sort Another helpful little bit is this: grep -h "$1" *.html | sort -u That helps for identifying what other editing scripts will have to be looking for. Probably most missed would have been Vi and the ability to pass portions of a file for editing by external scripts. Something as simple as :16,25!myedits (where "myedits" is a Perl, sed or whatever script containing multiple editing commands) can save hours, as can assigning repetitive tasks to macros. I'm not 100% done with the cleanup. There are still parts of the site I haven't gotten to, and other parts where I just did the bare minimum and need to return for more work. But it is largely complete, and I'm reasonably happy with the new look. I hope the readers agree. *Originally published at