scripting fun

[Bart Silverstrim]

Steve Lamb wrote:

>     The third reason is simple.  I saw your message and thought, "Wow, neat,
> that'd be fun to write in Python."  Seriously.  I enjoy the mental exercise of
> doodling with little tools like this in Python.  It's fun scripting versus, as
> I read it, the ironic scripting 'fun'.  ;)

To be honest, I would love to get more into programming, I simply 
haven't set aside time to learn it. I have been using Linux for over a 
decade, and while there are things I'm good at, programming isn't one of 
them, unfortunately. I fully figured that the task I was asking 
about...pulling those IP's from a log, comparing them to a list of 
currently blocked IP's, then adding the difference of IP's to the 
iptables list...would be cake and I was asking something obvious.

It's a relief to see a little debate on how to best achieve this goal.

The reason I was going with scripting was because I thought this was a 
relatively simple task and it kind of grew in a piecemeal fashion from 
what I was previously doing by hand.

No need for a flame war...from what I understand, most of the 
scripting/interpreted languages tend to be better suited for text 
manipulation, so all things being equal for a task like this I would 
assume that the best answer is the one given in the style someone's most 
familiar with and could rattle an answer out in five minutes of typing. 
It's simply not a complex enough task to warrant fighting over it :-)