08/09/2002 @19:56:29 ^20:17:02

Daily posting histogram

ANOTHER NERDY PROGRAMMING POST ALERT although might be of interest to readers of AAW if they ignore the three lines in bold monospaced font below.

I just saved all 337 (yes, really:) ) posts available on AAW from my news server news.zetnet.co.uk into a mailbox, using slrn's facility for doing so. Then I constructed one of those fantastically long unix shell commands that's nearly a whole program in its own right. Get this:

cat /tmp/ng | grep '^Date:' | cut -b7-80 | date -f - +%s | sort \
| sed 's/.*/1970-1-1+&sec/' | date -f - | cut -b1-10 | uniq -c \
| awk '{printf "%s ",$0; for (i=0;i<$1/2;i++) printf "x"; print "";}'
      3 Tue Aug 27 xx
     34 Wed Aug 28 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     80 Thu Aug 29 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     44 Fri Aug 30 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     22 Sat Aug 31 xxxxxxxxxxx
     12 Sun Sep  1 xxxxxx
     46 Mon Sep  2 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     33 Tue Sep  3 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     13 Wed Sep  4 xxxxxxx
     18 Thu Sep  5 xxxxxxxxx
     12 Fri Sep  6 xxxxxx
     10 Sat Sep  7 xxxxx
     10 Sun Sep  8 xxxxx