My Tangle with ‘persey’
Alright, so I spent some time messing around with this thing called ‘persey’ recently. Heard about it somewhere, can’t remember where exactly, maybe some chat or forum post. Sounded kinda interesting, thought I’d give it a whirl, see what it was all about.
First off, finding the darn thing wasn’t super easy. No fancy website, just had to dig around a bit. Finally got my hands on what looked like the right files. It wasn’t like a normal install, you know? More like just grabbing some files and hoping for the best.
So, I downloaded the stuff. Tried to run it straight away. Big surprise: didn’t work. Complained about missing something or other. Figures. Spent a good hour just trying to figure out what it needed. Had to install some other library I’d never even heard of before. Bit of a pain, honestly.
After getting that sorted, I tried running ‘persey’ again. This time, it actually started up. Okay, progress! But then… what do I actually do with it? The instructions I found were pretty thin. Just a couple of basic commands listed, not much explanation.
Trying to Make it Work
I decided to try the most basic command listed. Typed it in. Hit enter. And… nothing happened. Or maybe something happened, but I couldn’t tell. No output, no error, just back to the command prompt. Great.
Okay, deep breath. Went back to the minimal instructions. Read them again, slower this time. Saw a mention of a configuration file somewhere. Had to hunt that down too. Opened it up, it was just a plain text file with a few settings.
Played around with those settings a bit. Changed a path here, tweaked a value there. Saved it. Tried the command again. Still nothing obvious.
I was about ready to give up, call it a waste of time. But then I tried pointing it at a specific folder I had with some junk text files in it. Typed the command like this:
persey --input /path/to/my/junk/folder --process
Something like that, anyway. And this time, bam! It actually did something. It spat out a bunch of lines on the screen, looked like it was reading the files and maybe… organizing them? Hard to say exactly.
What Came Out of It
After it finished churning, I checked the output folder it supposedly created (had to guess where that was based on the config file). And yeah, there were new files in there. Looked like ‘persey’ had taken my original text files, pulled out lines with specific keywords (I think that’s what one of the config settings controlled), and put them into new, sorted files.
So, that’s what it did. It was basically a specialized text processing tool, from what I could gather. Took me way longer to get it working than it should have, mostly because the setup and instructions were so bare-bones.
End result? Well, I got ‘persey’ to do something. It works, kinda. Is it useful for me? Probably not very often. It feels like a tool built for a very specific need. But hey, I poked at it, wrestled with it, and eventually made it bend to my will, sort of. That’s the process, right? Another little experiment logged.