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

In the tech support world, on-call responsibilities can be both challenging and draining. The Register's weekly column, "On Call," highlights the efforts of readers in keeping technology alive without receiving the recognition they deserve. This time, our focus is on "Tim," a reader who cleverly condensed 2,650 lines of C code into a mere six-line shell script.

The story unfolded during a time when the World Wide Web was not yet the go-to source for information. Tim, working for a phone company, was tasked with fixing a data transfer program that utilized a custom implementation of FTP. To locate the necessary code, Tim resorted to using a Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) to search remote databases.

After eight hours of tracking down the source code via WAIS, Tim successfully wrote his script. This script ran overnight to gather data from the telecommunications company's switches, refine the raw information, and subsequently upload it to a mainframe. If the script failed to connect to either the switch or mainframe after three attempts, it would automatically page Tim.

While the script worked as intended, the telco's network did not function properly. Consequently, Tim's pager began ringing two or three times a night, every night. After enduring two weeks of interrupted sleep, Tim's manager finally informed him to relinquish the pager to a colleague.

However, this colleague often left the pager at work, forgot to turn it on, or purposefully kept it out of hearing range. Eventually, Tim had no choice but to reclaim the pager and face another few weeks of sleepless nights.