How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
Great story! I did something like this for Epson about 14 years ago. I was a support person for printers and I one day overheard some grumbling by someone who was collating ink cartridge information.<p>Apparently they had "modified" a clipper database and added new records, but it was one record per file, with each field delimited by new line and field/values in ini format (key=value). They were opening each file in notepad, then copying each value into a spreadsheet. They had over 20,000 thousand files^H^H^H^H^H records, needless to say this took a long time to compile the excel file which they used for reporting. Like 9 weeks long.<p>I was mucking around with Perl at the time, and I casually mentioned this is what Perl is good for, I got this skeptical look, so I said I'd prove it. They gave me 100 sample files, and then I spent some time using file globbing and some regexes to split out the data. Whilst I was about it, I fiddled with hashes and worked out how to use refs, mainly because I was a bit bored and learning some Perl concepts.<p>I then returned the next day with a working program, installed a Windows version of Perl, then copied the 10,000 records locally, ran my script, tweaked it, then emailed the guy the CSV file I created. The script took about 45 seconds to run (it was a bit inefficient).<p>I then walked over to the guy, asked him to open his email and watched his eyes bulge a little. I then walked to my desk and took some more calls about printers.<p>A few weeks later, I was surprised to discover I had been made employee of the quarter by Epson Australia.