[Ilugc] Auto e-mail greeter program

[Girish Venkatachalam]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 12:39:11PM +0200, Binand Sethumadhavan wrote:
> On 16/10/06, Girish Venkatachalam <girishvenkatachalam at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 2. Your aeg script has a race condition; on multiuser systems with
> >> malicious users, this can lead to arbitrary files owned by the user
> >> running AEG to be wiped out. mktemp(1)  is the safe way of creating
> >> temporary files.
> >Oh yes, I know mktemp but forgot. I could put that change in but I am not 
> >too particular.
> 
> Yep, this is the single biggest argument used against FOSS. The
> developer is usually not particular about users' requirements or
> security considerations. Developer's response is in most cases, "works
> for me". I'd imagine 60% of the patches Redhat includes are about
> fixing things like race conditions etc. because the developer could
> not be bothered to fix silly bugs like these.
Interesting argument but I actually agree and I have uploaded the new versio with all your comments. 

Check out!

Coming to your argument I think you are right.

Open source developers don't actually care much about users or polish to be precise but then I find the quality of open source code to be much better since they are actually bothered that others are going to see it.

Whereas propreitary code ends up being really ugly, complex and buggy and too feature ridden...

So you can use the argument both ways.

I would go for a sensible open source development approach.

And user friendliness should make the user know what he is doing rather than treating him as an idiot. That is why I did not put the crontab entry myself. 

> 
> >That is actually meant to solve the confusion between mm/dd and dd/mm 
> >formats for dates. You can easily look at an entry and identify.
> 
> But you are asking your user to enter the same information twice, in
> slightly different formats. Why don't you use one format and convert
> to the other if need be? How would you like if a program asked you,
> "Enter IP address in x.y.z.t format" and in the next window, asks you
> "Enter same IP address as a 32-bit integer"?
Disagree, your case and my example are completely different.

I prefer my way. We in India use dd/mm and the script uses mm/dd.

Can cause a great deal of heartache...
> 
> >> 4. All your lines which goes "| cut -d '|' ..." can be replaced far
> >> cleaner with the bash inbuilt command "set".
> >How? Can you give a code sample? I guess I get what you are saying but 
> >some prodding will help. :-)
> 
> Well, given this $line:
> 
> Amma and appa |dad at yahoo.com,mom at gmail.com|mday|Oct 5|10/05
> 
> And this snippet:
> 
> declare -x oldifs="$IFS"; declare -x IFS="|"; set -- $line; declare -x
> IFS="$oldifs"
> 
> You can then have:
> 
> appellation="$1"
> mailids="$2"
> event="$3"
> event_date="$5"
> 
> and you don't have a single fork/exec combo for external programs in
> your script for this (and most of the code above is concerned about
> restoring IFS, which you can ignore inside a shell script under
> certain conditions).
Ahem, advanced scripting technique. Didn't understand but got the idea. Thananks. Shall surely remember in future.
> 
> In addition, this messy bit:
> 
>        TODAY=`date +%D | cut -d/ -f1-2`
>        event_date=`echo ${line} | cut -d'|' -f5 `
>        if [ "${TODAY}" = "${event_date}" ];then
>                send_email
>        fi
> 
> is far cleaner if you go as (with event_date coming from your FOURTH
> field ("Oct 16"), not the fifth):
> 
> if [ `date +%j` -eq `date +%j -d $event_date` ]; then
>    send_mail
> fi
Looks very interesting and smart but I prefer my way.

For me, an internal representation using digits and slashes without space characters are better for data munching than a human readable form which is retrofitted to work in programs...

However appreciate your input at the same time.

Thanks.

Guys,

	Please check out the latest bug fixed version!

	I think you should run it! It is very very colorful!

	Even in console, it looks so cool I have hardly seen such a nicely written console GUI.

	No, I am not boasting, I am just happy at my setup script.

	However I definitely want to learn ncurses programming and programming using the dialog utility..

regards,
Girish