Carl was debugging a job management script. The first thing that caught his attention was that the script was called file.bat. They were running on Linux.
The second thing he noticed, was that the script was designed to manage up to 999 jobs, and needed to simply roll job count over once it exceeded 999- that is to say, job 1 comes after job 999.
Despite being called file.bat, it was in fact a Bash script, and thus did have access to the basic mathematical operations bash supports. So while this could have been done via some pretty basic arithmetic in Bash, doing entirely in Bash would have meant not using Awk. And if you know how to use Awk, why would you use anything but Awk?
njobno=`echo $jobno | awk '{if ($0<999) {print $0 + 1} else { print 1 }}'`
As Carl writes: "I don't mind the desire to limit job count by way of mod(1000) but what an implementation!"
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This post originally appeared on The Daily WTF.