How Quick is Quick?

Just for fun I wrote a little shell script to download and install Qdig on my notebook machine to see how quickly it could be installed and configured. The answer: Two seconds!

The two-second-installation shell script and its output from when I ran it are shown below. The script downloads the tarball directly from an FTP mirror (which isn't a good habit, btw), unpacks the tarball, moves the tarball out of the http document tree, creates the qdig-files/ directory, changes permissions on qdig-files/, visits the (hard-coded) URL, and changes permissions again. The installation is complete and ready for images and / or gallery directories to be created with my desktop SCP client in two seconds.

I wiped things clear and tried the script three times. The time difference was two seconds all three times. Most of the execution time seems to be consumed by downloading the file.

This script shouldn't be construed as a recommended installation technique for the average Qdig user.

The Shell Script

 #!/bin/bash
 # inst-qdig.sh
 # This script Downloads and installs Qdig, then sets up the writable
 # directory.  I created it to answer a simple question: "How quickly
 # can Qdig be installed and configured?"  The answer appears to be:
 # "In 2 seconds."
 #
 echo -n "Starting:"
 date                         # Display the time.
 cd public_html/
 # Download the Qdig tarball.
 lftpget http://[mirror].dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/qdig/qdig-1.1.X.tar.gz
 tar -zxvf qdig-1.1.X.tar.gz
 mv qdig-1.1.X.tar.gz ~/tmp   # Move the tarball from the http document root.
 cd qdig
 mkdir qdig-files
 chmod 2777 qdig-files/
 echo "Visit the URL now."
 # visit the URL with wget.
 wget http://127.0.0.1/~installer/qdig/ --delete-after # visit the url once
 chmod 0755 qdig-files/
 cd ..
 echo -n "Done: "
 date

The Output

 installer@pod:~$ sh inst-qdig.sh
 Starting:Mon Apr  5 01:25:36 MST 2004
 qdig/
 qdig/admin.php
 qdig/CHANGELOG.txt
 qdig/index.php
 qdig/INSTALL.txt
 qdig/LICENSE.txt
 qdig/prepGallery.sh
 qdig/qdig-admin.ico
 qdig/qdig-camera.ico
 qdig/README.txt
 qdig/TODO.txt
 Visit the URL now.
 --02:25:38--  http://127.0.0.1/%7Einstaller/qdig/
            => `index.html'
 Connecting to 127.0.0.1:80... connected.
 HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
 Length: unspecified [text/html]

     [ <=>                  ] 2,486         --.--K/s

 02:25:38 (23.71 MB/s) - `index.html' saved [2486]

 Removing index.html.
 Done: Mon Apr  5 01:25:38 MST 2004

Conclusion

Obviously this takes some preparation time because the URL for the current-release tarball and the URL for the gallery are hard coded into the script, but it shows that Qdig can be installed very quickly!

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