Regex is good for a few very specific things, and sysadmins used to use it for goddamn everything. If all your server logs are in lightly-structured text files on a small number of servers, being able to improvise regex is damn useful for tracking down server problems. Just write a shell loop that spawns an ssh logging into each server and running grep over the log files, to look for that weird error.
These days, if you need to crunch production server logs you probably need to improvise in SQL and jq and protobufs or systemd assmonkery or something.
But if you actually need a parser, for goodness sake use a parser combinator toolkit, don’t roll your own, especially not with regex. Describing your input language in plain Haskell is much nicer than kludging it.
(This is the “totally serious software engineering advice” forum, right?)
Thanks, I now have insight into my own personal hell for when I die.
Regex is good for a few very specific things, and sysadmins used to use it for goddamn everything. If all your server logs are in lightly-structured text files on a small number of servers, being able to improvise regex is damn useful for tracking down server problems. Just write a shell loop that spawns an
sshlogging into each server and runninggrepover the log files, to look for that weird error.These days, if you need to crunch production server logs you probably need to improvise in SQL and
jqand protobufs or systemd assmonkery or something.But if you actually need a parser, for goodness sake use a parser combinator toolkit, don’t roll your own, especially not with regex. Describing your input language in plain Haskell is much nicer than kludging it.
(This is the “totally serious software engineering advice” forum, right?)