Dear Unix Diary,

Yesterday, Unix helped me (again) doing my job in an easier and faster way.
At work, we bought a new check in machine, that comes along with RFID cards. We also bought a card printing machine for the occasion.
My job was then to print the logo of the company, with the name, surname and ID of the 84 persons that are going to use these cards. The original approach would have been:

• Fire up paint to create the template of the card
  
• Fill in the info for the first person
  
• Export the image
  
• Print it on the card
  
• Repeat
  

That's not what Unix taugh me, sorry.
I started vim, and created a small script using some imagemagick binaries (convert + composite) that create the image from 4 parameters: $_login (first letter of the surname + 7 letters from the name) $_name, $_surname and $_id. I then asked the HR departement for a CSV export of the names/surname of the persons I had to create a badge for, and exported a list of the login names + IDs from the checkin software. I now had 2 lists: people.csv (name + surname), and checkin.csv (id + login).

First, I used Vim's macros to create the login of each person in people.csv. Now in the two lists, my first column is the login of each person.
And here comes Unix...
Now I have a list with login, name, surname and ID. All I have to do now is to write a wrapper script for my "card-maker" that will read each line of the final.csv and create a card for the person:

And here I am ! 84 card images created in half an hour, instead of having to edit 84 times the same image in paint, and changing the names by hand.

Thank you, Unix !