Okay, let’s talk about this thing called ‘yahq’ I messed around with recently.
Getting Started
Found this tool, ‘yahq’, mentioned somewhere obscure. Sounded like it might help with sorting through some old log files I had piling up. Figured, why not, let’s give it a shot. Didn’t seem like a big download, which was a plus.
So, I grabbed it. No installer, just a bunch of files. Typical. Had to figure out where to put them and if I needed anything else installed. The instructions, well, they weren’t exactly crystal clear. Spent a good hour just trying to get the command recognized in my terminal. Had to mess with path settings, always a joy.
The First Try
Finally got it to run. Pointed it at a small test log file. Typed the command, hit enter, and… nothing. Just an error message. Something cryptic about syntax. Great. Back to the minimal documentation. Tried a few variations of the command arguments. More errors. Each one slightly different, just to keep things interesting.
It felt like guesswork. Honestly, it was pure trial and error. I started changing options one by one. Added a flag, removed a flag, changed the order. It was slow going. I thought this was supposed to save time?
- Checked the input file format. Maybe it didn’t like my logs?
- Tried absolute paths instead of relative ones.
- Looked for examples online, but ‘yahq’ isn’t exactly popular. Found very little.
Making Some Progress
After what felt like forever, fiddling with quoting and escape characters for a specific filter pattern, it suddenly processed the file! No error this time. Just spat out a result. Okay, progress!
I looked at the output. It… sort of did what I wanted? It filtered the lines, yeah, but the formatting was weird. And it seemed to have missed some entries I expected to see. So, back to the drawing board. More tweaking with the filter settings. More running it on the test file.
It turned out the filtering logic was quite sensitive. A space here, a slightly different timestamp format there, and ‘yahq’ would just skip the line. Took another round of testing to understand its quirks.
Final Thoughts
Eventually, I got ‘yahq’ working reliably on my test files. It processed them and gave me the output I needed. But man, the setup and learning curve were rough. Way more effort than I expected for a simple log filtering task.
Would I use it again? Maybe. If I had the exact same problem and remembered all the hoops I jumped through. But for anything slightly different? I’d probably just write a quick script myself. It would likely be faster in the long run.
It reminds me of this old bike I had once. Took ages to fix up, constant adjustments needed. It worked, sure, but it was always a hassle. Sometimes, simple and familiar tools are just better, even if they don’t sound as fancy. Spent a whole afternoon on ‘yahq’, could’ve probably finished the actual task manually in that time. Lesson learned, I guess.
