That's certainly a very cute way to do it, but why wouldn't you want to use DECnet instead of IP?  You could also FTP depending on whether you have a Fascist firewall or not (if Johnny is running FTP).  However, I don't think the Unix ftp client would give you a reasonable return code like curl might (?)

Of course, one of the things I'm looking to do is find bugs and squash them and I have had to make a number of changes in the Tops-20 monitor, the Galaxy libraries, FAL, NFT and DAPLIB.  As a matter of fact, I still haven't gotten to the bottom of a bug that I appear to have introduced into FAL.  Sigh...  It's still my idea of fun.

I have awk on Tops-20, but every time I think about using a Unix utility there, I get indigestion.  Don't get me wrong, I tutor shell scripts and awk and all that, but for personal use...

On the other hand, one assumes that I probably could have done the whole SETNODE rewrite in a couple of scripts in a few days instead of doing it in assembler in a few months.  Oh well, it *IS* a hobby after all


On 2/21/23 4:38 AM, Keith Halewood wrote:

These days, to get a nodes.conf file suitable for pydecnet, I tend to:

curl http://mim.stupi.net/nodedb | awk '/^[A-Z0-9]+ +[0-9\.]+/ {print "node " $2 " " $1}' > nodes.conf


Keith