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If it's not broken, don't fix itby RhetTbull (Curate) |
on Dec 21, 2001 at 20:46 UTC ( [id://133799]=perlmeditation: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
I was tweaking a rather complicated data processing script of mine last week when I ran accross an output pipe I was using to massage the data:
I said to myself: "self, why are you using two processes (sort and uniq) when one (sort with -u flag) would work? That's silly." So, even though it had nothing to do with what I was tweaking, I changed the output pipe ot be: and thought to myself "hah! got rid of one extra step." Now, yesterday I noticed that the script was producing erroneous output. Since the input data often changes (depending on who produced it!) I have no formal spec for the input and I'm often tweaking the processing script to adapt it to new input formats (be liberal in what you accept). I thought that must have happened so I spent a good part of the day trying to track down what had changed. Since the data is several hundred MBs in size this process took a while. Once I finally exhausted all possiblity that the input data was bad I turned to the script and finally I decided to test to see if "sort -u" was really equivalent to "sort | uniq" my test data:
Aha! With multiple keys, sort -u does not behave as I had assumed. The moral of this little story: If it's not broken, then don't mess with it! (Oh, and don't assume either!)
Update:
In light of the excellent comments and feedback here, I think I'll modify the moral of this story:
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