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

It wasn't the not-very-legal source code raid that caused it, but a colleague who punted a pager

Working in tech support can be thankless when gormless colleagues leave you sleepless. Which is why, each Friday, The Register runs a new instalment of On Call – the reader contributed column which ensures your work to keep tech alive doesn't remain unnoticed.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Tim" who told that while working for a phone company he once rewrote 2,650 lines of C as a six line shell script.

He performed that feat after being asked to fix a data transfer program that, strangely, included a bespoke implementation of the venerable File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

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"Writing the script took eight hours, most of it tracking down the source code of FTP so I could see if it would do what I wanted," Tim wrote.

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This story took place before the World Wide Web became the way to find information online. To find the code he needed, Tim therefore used a Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) to search remote databases.

"In those days, there was no Linux and AT&T had licensed the Unix source code to universities with the struct proviso that it never be made publicly available," Tim explained. "It took me quite some time using WAIS to track it down – the security could have been better – and read the code."

Having found what he needed, Tim wrote his script, which ran overnight to collect data from the telco's switches, tidied up the raw info, and uploaded it to a mainframe.

"It would automatically page me if it couldn't connect to a switch or mainframe after three attempts," he explained.

The script worked fine, but the telco's networks didn't. Tim's pager was soon going off two or three times a night, every night.

After two weeks of interrupted sleep, Tim's manager kindly told him to give the pager to a colleague.

But that colleague habitually left the pager at work, forgot to turn it on, or conveniently placed it out of earshot.

So Tim reluctantly took back the pager and endured another few weeks of nightly interruptions.

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How many consecutive sleepless nights have you endured while On Call? If you have enough energy, click here to send your story with On Call so we can share it on a future Friday. ®