Subj : FidoGazette Vol 13 no 39 Page: 3 To : Janis Kracht From : Sean Dennis Date : Sat Oct 05 2019 23:39:38 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 * Origin: Outpost BBS * bbs.outpostbbs.net:2304 (1:18/200) .