Re: Using wildcards to remove archives

[Graham Percival <gperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 12:07:57AM +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Mar 2019 16:28:25 -0700
> Craig Hartnett <craig.lists@subs4.sitnominedigna.com> wrote:
> 
> > Thanks, but wow, that seems unnecessarily complicated and
> > time-consuming.

Computer people are sometimes like mathematicians: we like to rely
on tools that we already know.  :)

As the old joke goes,

    A mathematician had a change of heart and decided to embark on
    a career change to become a fire fighter. He walks into a fire
    station, approaches the supervisor and demands to be hired.

    Even though there were positions open, the supervisor doesn't
    consider the mathematician very practical and decides to give
    him two tests before he hired the mathematician.

    The supervisor takes the mathematician to the back of the
    station and lights the dumpster on fire, saying "What do you
    do?" The mathematician immediately picks up a hose and puts
    the fire out.

    The supervisor now asks his final question, "Now that the
    dumpster is not on fire, what do you do?"

    The mathematician thinks and says "This problem can be reduced
    to a problem with a known solution." and lights the dumpster
    on fire.

    (credit: I copied it from
    https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/16ujs2/my_math_professor_told_us_this_joke_today/
    but I first heard it in a university calculus lecture.  :)


> Before re-inventing the wheel, take a look at ACTS:
> 
>  https://www.tarsnap.com/helper-scripts.html

Definitely!

There's a few reasons why you might not want to use one of those
helper scripts:
- you're paranoid that the script authors might have added a
  backdoor, and you're not confident enough about language X to
  check the script yourself.
  Since Tarsnap is software for the truly paranoid, we definitely
  respect such concerns!
- you enjoy crafting tools yourself and tinkering with your
  computer.

If neither of those reasons apply to you, I think it's worth
checking out those scripts.  No sense worrying about something
that others have already worked on!

Cheers,
- Graham