One day several years ago I found a ~15 year old laptop on the side of the road and wondered what I'd do with it. 300MHz processor, "what's Ethernet?", and I di

One day several years ago I found a ~15 year old laptop on the side of the road and wondered what I'd do with it. 300MHz processor, "what's Ethernet?", and I didn't have the little pile of flaky USB Wi-Fi dongles I have now. And it was only through attempting to actually install from the Slackware CDs I'd burnt several years earlier that I discovered the scratches on them were unfortunately not just decorative scars. So: gcc, corrupt. g++, corrupt. Python, corrupt. Perl, corrupt. sed, ...not corrupt. grep, also not corrupt. I love working on little projects. At one point I noticed that installing specific packages quickly and easily wasn't straightforward because I couldn't see what was already installed. dialog was among the uncorrupted, and I wondered if I might use this to show installed and uninstalled packages side by side. That was when I discovered the info pages were also intact, and that sed and grep both had excellent info documentation. Unfortunately I deliberately gave up working on the project after a few days, as I developed headaches from staring at multiple ~5-6 line (ie, ~480 char) monster regexes over the course of a week or so. (Imagine multiple blocks of modem line noise each 2-4 times longer than http://bash.org/?464385 http://bash.org/?464385 and you're in the ballpark.) I do plan to finish that script at some point though (when I regain access to that laptop's HDD). It was only 5 sed commands and 4 grep commands...