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48 sea levels and a trope for your terminal

The messiest dataset I've ever audited included a field that illustrates a key rule of Fussy Database Management: Never let users enter free-text data in a field unless absolutely necessary.

The field in question was for elevations and it contained 48 different strings that all meant "sea level":

sl1

Another 39 strings meant "near sea level":

sl2

How to bulk-replace all 48 sea levels with "0 m a.s.l." (for example)? One way would be to save those unique entries in a file (I called the file "sl1"; see first screenshot, above), then store them in an AWK array. When AWK finds one of those entries in the elevation field (field 27 in "table"), it replaces the entry:

awk 'BEGIN {FS=OFS="\t"} FNR==NR {a[$0]; next} $27 in a {$27="0 m a.s.l."} 1' sl1 table > newtable

check

In movies and on TV over the past 25 years or so, "ACCESS DENIED" usually pops up when the keyboard user fails in a login attempt. I used to think this trope was pure Americana, but you can find it in Australian productions as well (below).

JackIrish

A still from the 2016 Jack Irish TV series, set in Melbourne. Maybe the TV producers were showing here a possible replacement for the ancient LEAP database used by Victoria Police.

Obviously we need this important message in our terminals, so here it is, obfuscated. Use it double-quoted with echo -e or with printf (add "\n" at the end) for little-visited if/else conditions in your scripts.

\e[41m\x20\e[97m\e[1m\x41\x43\x43\x45\x53\x53\x20\x44\x45\x4e\x49\x45\x44\x21\x20\e[0m

accessdenied
 

Last update: 2020-01-13
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