Content-Type: text/shitpost

I have a program that is a wrapper around ssh. It's officially named employer-ssh, and running employer-ssh git looks up the alias monkey in a table to find the real hostname, monkey-01.deployed-uswest.employer-ec2.com and then runs ssh monkey-01.deployed-uswest.employer-ec2.com. There are some other features attached to it also. For example, it makes sure that the VPN is connected before it tries to run ssh.

I never actually invoke it as employer-ssh monkey, though. Instead, I just run monkey, which is a symlink to employer-ssh. The program sees that no argument has been supplied, and infers that monkey is the alias I wanted to use.

It sometimes happens that I need that long hostname in some other context though, and for quite a while the way I would look it up would be to grep the source code of the program:

    % grep monkey $(which monkey)
      monkey ) host=monkey-01.deployed-uswest.employer-ec2.com

This had been bugging me for a while, and I had the idea of giving the program a flag so that instead of running ssh it would just print out the full hostname. After several months, I finally got around to putting in that feature.

Or I tried to. I found it had been there all along:

    % monkey what
    monkey-01.deployed-uswest.employer-ec2.com      

This mode also makes it skip the part where it deals with the VPN.

I don't know what to conclude from this.

(Previously)