Flashes of Panic

So, I use this beautiful little script which, run daily, sends me a capsule overview of most of the “interesting” things in my system logs over the past day. It depends heavily on Perl and regular expressions, and installing Postgrey and upgrading one of the mail servers meant I had a lot of log lines it wouldn’t recognize. So I’ve spent part of this afternoon installing the latest version on the relevant servers.

My mainstay server is showing its age. The default system Perl is now too old for some scripts, but with other services depending on the older version I’ve worked around this by installing a second Perl at a slightly different path. After installation, I need to correct the shebang on each file which has one, to use the “correct” (modern) version of Perl.

Which either has me opening and editing a few dozen files one by one, or learning the obscure geekiness which is sed. Timewise, it’s a wash, but learning about sed is more fun. (On my Mac, there is BBEdit’s wonderful multi-file find-and-replace. Why doesn’t emacs have that? It has everything else, after all.)

Still, how did I get there from log files?

Now Playing: Bring A Gun from Seven by James