$ echo ‘[q]sa[ln0=aln256%Pln256/snlbx]sb3135071790101768542287578439snlbxq’|dc

I love BASH. It was my first shell. Cat Stevens informs us that, “The first cut is the deepest.” For me BASH fills this role. Some of the first things I was coding into a computer of meaning (beyond silly BASIC programs) were done in BASH. From pipes to redirections to brute command execution, BASH gets it done with very few dependencies on a modern UNIX environment.

My most recent BASH escapades involved taking a long list of sources to be downloaded and processed for a monthly website log report. The task took about six hours to manually click, copy & paste, and edit into a format that was human readable. I decided that my time was better spent watching videos on YouTube^H^H^H^H^H^H working on more important projects. So I took six hours and scripted with BASH to have it generate an HTML report that uploaded itself automagically to a secured portion of the website for perusal. Running this from a Cron job was the best idea I think I’ve ever had.