Awhile ago, two family members of mine were programming something for a simple task, they chose to do it in Visual Basic as the program was going to be running in a Windows environment anyway. The task was having a simple program that would run in the background -- or ran when needed -- to print a specific file (or multiple files) whenever the file(s) changed, specifically, whenever the file was modified. This was being done on a Windows system so file changes related to permissions, ownership, etc, didn't apply.
There were small problems getting it to work properly (as this can happen programming anything.) Seeing the code, everything looked like it would work, but it didn't, not ever having much experience with Visual Basic -- I only learned a few things, and they were during my last year using Windows, this was around three years ago -- I could only offer a few guesses related to the errors it was throwing. The code reminded me of Python, and the errors reminded me of C++, C#, and Perl mixed together, they were not at all useful.
When they first started working on it, I had already mentally written the code to accomplish such a task in my head as PHP, but I wasn't quite sure how I would run the PHP code in the background locally on a Windows system, let alone print to a local Windows printer using PHP.
That's when it hit me, BASH!
No, nothing bashed me in the head, I am referring to GNU BASH. I knew that it would be an easy task in BASH, a couple variables, a simple "while loop", an "if", and the print command "lpr". Here's what I got:
moddate=$(stat -c %y workdoc.txt)
moddate=${moddate% *}
while [ 1 ]; do
sleep 1
newmoddate=$(stat -c %y workdoc.txt)
newmoddate=${newmoddate% *}
if [[ $newmoddate != $moddate ]]; then
lpr workdoc.txt
moddate=$newmoddate
fi
done
What I noticed was: this is near 50% smaller than Visual Basic's source. And BASH automatically runs in the background of a graphical environment -- unless it's executed from an open graphical terminal (such as gnome-terminal) -- at least in GNOME it works this way.
I'll note that I didn't find a way to use it conveniently on Windows, but it would be easy enough to run the code through SHC and compile the C source code for Windows. Despite the title, I eventually helped finish the program with a simple BATCH script, so both BASH and Visual Basic were out of the picture.
I write about this because I find it interesting, and because it's been a long time since I've written any code that someone might have a real-world or business related use for. So... It's simple! It's fast! Use it if you want :)