My lowly internet outpost wound up at the top of /r/programming on Reddit over Easter weekend due to my silly goto-in-bash hack. It turns out that that one page is probably the most searched-for out of anything on my website. There are a lot of frustrated shell programmers out there.
Regarding the critiques from the discussion, comments of the form “you’ve an X/Y problem” were least interesting to me. Yes, I know about Makefiles. Sometimes it is fun to do something different, which is known to be far from a best practice, just because one can.
Comments that improved my sed syntax, or provided a historical context, were most interesting. For the record: no, I didn’t intend to use branching in sed as a self-referential nod to the topic du jour, but I like pretending that I was that clever instead of the reality, which is that I just didn’t know the right sed magic. So, I’ll keep the branching.
See if you can spot the traffic spike:
