Developer cleverly shrank 2,600 lines of C into a six-line script but still ending up losing sleep

A telecoms support worker, known as Tim, replaced a 2,650-line C data-transfer programme with a six-line shell script after discovering the programme contained its own version of FTP. The rewrite made the overnight job simpler, but unreliable network connections triggered repeated pager alerts, showing how a technical fix can leave the underlying operational problem untouched.

Tim said writing the script took eight hours, including time spent using the pre-web WAIS system to find and read Unix source code. The script gathered data from telephone switches, cleaned it and sent it to a mainframe, paging him after three failed connection attempts. After two or three alerts a night for two weeks, a colleague took over the pager but often failed to keep it nearby or switched on, so Tim took it back and faced several more weeks of interruptions.