Hi Janis,

 JK>   I use a bash script I wrote ages ago to
 JK> 'print' the fidogazette to the echo, create the 
 JK> archive, make the reports in
 JK> the 'zine, and hatch it out.. it all looked like greek to me :)

When I switched my BBS over to ArcaOS from Slackware, I rewrote a lot of my
scripts from bash over to REXX.  With Arca, however, a lot of your basic core
programs have been ported over, such as sed and awk.  Many of the little
scripts I wrote, such as one that grabs a weekly newsletter from an amateur
radio website and converts it to CP437-based text, were basically a direct
port.

Now the script I wrote that runs MakeNL, creates the nodelist and infopack for
Micronet, copies the nodelist over for my nodelist compiler, and runs NEF to
hatch and announce the files as well as run cURL to upload the two archives to
my website was ported directly to REXX.

I have a script that scrapes the text-based local forecast for my area from my
local NWS's website, converts it to CP437, and posts it hourly as a text
bulletin to my BBS.  I also wrote one that grabs the Telnet BBS Guide monthly
list and hatches it out in Micronet.

There is only one that I cannot port unfortunately and that is because
"expect", part of the Tcl/Tk toolkit, hasn't been ported to OS/2-Arca.  I am
trying to find a workalike but so far I don't see one.  I did add Pete
Norloff's entire OS2BBS filebase, about 11 GB worth of files or around 22,000
files, into my BBS.  It was pretty easy since Pete ran Maximus 2.02 and I run
Maximus/2 v3.01.  Just copied the file areas onto my hard drive, set them up in
FILEAREA.CTL then ran "fbp -a". :D

If you want, I could share some of these smaller scripts I've written.  They're
nothing fancy or difficult though the one for the Micronet weekly maintenance
is a bit hectic (and I am hesitant to share that one).

I have found that my curiosity about writing scripts has helped me immensely in
many things, not only just BBSing, but working in IT in general.  It's nice to
know how to automate some rather boring and mindless tasks :)

Later,
Sean

P.S. I use "links" heavily in scraping websites.  Its built-in capacity to
properly "dump" HTML to text as well as converting the text to CP437 is a huge
help.  "Lynx" does the same and it will automatically create footnotes with the
full dumps of all URLs listed on a page.  I don't need that for now so I use
"links".


--- Maximus/2 3.01