What is the most useful script you've written for everyday life? [closed]

Answer 1

A Quick and Dirty Python script that looked up the DNS for google.com every 5 seconds and beeped once if it succeeded and twice if it failed.

I wrote this during a time when I had to live with a highly flaky home network. It allowed me to instantly know the state of the network even while I was head first under the desk across the room with both hands full of network cable and a flashlight in my mouth.

Answer 2

A Greasemonkey script to add a "press that button a lot" control box to an online game.

Answer 3

Wrote a script to click my start button, then click it again in half a second, and repeat every 30 seconds.

Keeps me marked Online while at work, and I can get the real work done on my personal laptop right next to it. Not bogged down by work software.

Don't tell the boss :)

Answer 4

I'm a private pilot. I wrote a couple of scripts that obtain weather information for local airports from aviationweather.gov. They were useful for a quick answer to the question "Is today a good day to fly?"

Answer 5

I wrote a script that ended up being used every day in my team. When I used to work for Intel we had an app that talked to an access database to grab a dump of register information (I worked on validating chipsets). It would take this information (from a SQL query) and dump it into a CSV file, HTML file, and an Excel file. The whole process took almost 2 hours. No joke. No idea why it took so long. We would start it up an hour before lunch, go to lunch, and then come back.

I thought that there had to be a better way of doing this. I talked to the team that maintained the registry database and got the SQL code from them. I then wrote a perl script that grabbed the data and outputted it into CSV, HTML, and Excel formats. Runtime? Around 1-2 seconds. A great speed improvement.

I also wrote a few scripts while I was on deployment in Iraq in 2006 (I served in the National Guard for 9 years - got out in December). We used this old app called ULLS-G (Unit Level Logistics System - Ground) that was written in ADA and originally ran on DOS. They hacked it enough to where it would run on Windows XP in a command shell. This system didn't have a mouse interface. Everything was via keyboard and it had NO batch functionality. So let's say you wanted to print out licenses for all vehicle operators? Well... we had 150 soldiers in our unit so it took a LONG time. Let's say everyone got qualified on a new vehicle and you wanted to add it to everyone's operator qualifications? You had to do it one by one.

I was able to find an ODBC driver for the SAGE database (what ULLS-G used) and so I wrote perl scripts that were able to talk to the SAGE database. So things that took over an hour, now took only a few seconds. I also used my scripts and the driver for reporting. We had to report all information up to battalion every morning. Other units would write the information in by hand every morning. I whipped up an Excel macro that talked used the same driver and talked to the SAGE database and updated the Excel spreadsheet that way. It's the most complicated and only Excel macro I've ever written. It paid off because they awarded me the Army Commendation Medal. So yeah, I got a medal in the military for writing perl scripts :) How many can say that? ;)

Answer 6

A shell script to perform rotating backups using rsync. It also supports executing arbitrary child programs to support other pre-backup activities (downloading delicious bookmarks, for example).

http://gist.github.com/6806