[Mark Hensler]

programming an art... hmm..

Art isn't always something of beauty or visual at all. Martial arts, for example..

When programming, there is always more than one way to do something. It can be considered an 'art' to optimize code.

For example, I wrote a script to count the number of maps entries in a mapcycle.txt file for a Half-Life server. (snippet from my WAHL project)

//$tmp = "cat $mapcycle_path | grep -v '^$' | grep -cv '^[ ]*//'";
$tmp = 'awk \\'BEGIN{c=0} ($0!="^$" && $0!="^\s*//"){c+=1} END{print  c}\\' ' . $mapcycle_path;

$mapcycle_number = exec($tmp);

I developed the command at a prompt in SSH, just playing with greps and piping them into each other. When I had a combo that worked, I put it in my PHP script. Later, I got 'creative' and decided to shrink it all down to one shell command.