[NetBehaviour] New developments - On Being/"exist.pl"

[Pall Thayer]

Well, on the screen you don't see anything happen (that's why I warned jwm
not to be disappointed). Once you give the command, it starts running so it
drops from the command prompt but doesn't give you another because it's
going through a consistent loop that is maintained by the existence of the
exist.pl file. So as long as it exists in the same location, it just keeps
looping but as I say, outwardly it doesn't appear to be doing anything.
That's where the importance of the code comes in, if you look at the code
(and I've included comments that explain to some degree what's going on,
anything following a "#" is an explanatory comment that isn't executed as
code), you can see that there is actually a lot going on. Within the loop
(indicated with the "while" function) it continuously checks if the file is
still there, whether the program is in fact running (which is sort of funny
because it wouldn't be able to check if it weren't running), whether there
are other programs running on the computer and if there are, it locates
itself within the whole group of programs running on the same computer. It
doesn't actually do anything with the information it gathers. It just keeps
checking over and over again if the information is still there. If you try
running it, it will exit if you delete the file, but not before recreating
itself. So it will stop, but you can start it running right away again
because the file you deleted will have magically re-appeared (that's what I
refer to as its "will to live").

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 6:50 PM, bob catchpole <bobcatchpole at yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:

> Pall,
>
> What's happens when you run exist.pl?
>
> I don't know anything about programming, but the recent exchange of ideas
> around your code has been the highlight for me since joining the list. Best
> has been the palpable shared sense of excitement in exploring a perceived
> 'state of being' and trying to give expression to it with new tools. Respect
> to all in the thread - brilliant net behaviour!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bob
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Pall Thayer <pallthay at gmail.com>
> Sent: Friday, 25 July, 2008 2:24:37 PM
>
> ps. Just out of curiosity. Has anyone actually tried running exist.pl on
> their own computer? It should run on any Mac OS X or Linux computer (or
> any *nix variation). I'd be interested in hearing what people think.
>
> For those unfamiliar with Perl scripts, simply copy and paste the code
> into a text file and title it exist.pl Then open a terminal window, cd
> to the folder where you saved it and type 'perl exist.pl'
>
> Pall
>
>
> Rob Myers wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 12:44 PM, james jwm-art net <james at jwm-art.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Just a quick thought:
> >>
> >> how about a client/server model? so there could be several components
> >> communicating with each other?
> >>
> >
> > Or peer-to-peer, for a more equal society. ;-)
> >
> > - Rob.
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
>
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-- 
*****************************
Pall Thayer
artist
http://www.this.is/pallit
*****************************
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