Doug vs. the interweb

October 17th, 2009 7:04 PM

Nerd alert

I kind of love finding distributed yet shared experiences. Call them memes or tropes or pop culture or whatever, but I love nonsense like this. Tell me more about "are you a robot" indeed; it is the hallmark of a terrible bot that just isn't even goddamn trying. Get out of here robot nobody likes your style. Typically though, pop culture references on the order of "oh you remember this from your childhood well here it is again isn't that HILARIOUS" usually is pretty useless and dumb, but perhaps I make concessions when it involves things that actually matter, like SCIENCE.

In an almost slightly similar vein, every time I have to wrangle the batch files it usually ends up a cavalcade of frustration. Today was no exception, when I decided I wanted to do something as innocent as loop through some directory names. I knew I had done it before, and I knew there were all kinds of weird things going on with it, so I turned to trust The Internet to refresh my memory only to find it was GONE and I could not get my illicit neighbornet to connect. It was like 1996 all over again, alone bashing at the command line just seeing what I could come up with, bereft of tutorials or instant-information. I had to dredge up old knowledge while stretching out guesses, and somehow got the dang thing working just fine all on my own, which was a glorious victory over the machine. I was feeling generous so I added some comments to the file so next time I'd remember more of its peculiarities. In this pursuit, I realized one thing that batch files have over the competition -- comment syntax!:

Rem ember that you cannot change environment while in loop!
for /D %%f in (*) do (
cd %%f
if exist "%archive%" del "%archive%"
7z %command% %switches% "%archive%" "%src%"
cd..
)

I suppose if you don't get why I find that hilarious, you are probably better off.