smushai.com) by way of a web-browser. You can also write your own code to read in and process the JSON output in a program. ~~~ alangpierce Interesting! I think this also opens up the possibility to write your own "web crawler" (at least with a reasonable regex-based language) and run it on the cloud! A lot of my current projects make use of large, well-structured JSON files for data, and it would be convenient to be able to make a custom crawler to handle that instead of doing the extraction from scratch by hand. ------ wanda The book seems to suggest running this over all directories/files in the current repo. Can anyone explain how to do this for non-git repos? $ cd /some/remote/dir $ find . -name "*.js" -exec dosomthing.sh \; I suppose you could specify the root folder directly instead of using cd? ------ Sreyanth1 There is a similar one available here : [https://github.com/bcatc/jsmin.c](https://github.com/bcatc/jsmin.c) ------ wodenokoto What is the purpose of this? Why not just a node script? I don’t understand why I need to learn a shell script to parse something that is easily parseable by a javascript engine. ~~~ dave_sullivan It's been a while since I've worked on this, but you don't want to write a javascript execution engine in your programming language. The reason it's not javascript is that it needs to process thousands of files in a second, while a javascript engine usually deals with only one or two files a second. You'll also need to precompile the scripts and include them in the executable, so that it can be distributed. All of which is much easier in a scripting language like python, bash, etc. ~~~ wodenokoto That seems like a very odd thing to do, considering javascript can actually parse code on the fly and it has first class functions and variables and so on [1]. If you are making a shell script to do this, why don't you just put the script in javascript and then use a JS interpreter in the same script? As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I've done this before. This is probably why: How to minify your javascript with node.js, less and gulp? [1] [http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-lex-20110602/#lexical_grammar_...](http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD- lex-20110602/#lexical_grammar_rules) ~~~ lukeschlather What are you going to use to parse the code on the fly? It's easy enough to write a recursive descent parser in LISP, Java, Python, C, Bash, or a number of other languages. What makes you think you should be rewriting in JavaScript? ~~~ wodenokoto > What are you going to use to parse the code on the fly? Because it needs to run on the server, where you have all the software installed and nobody can access it but you. > It's easy enough to write a recursive descent parser in LISP, Java, Python, > C, Bash, or a number of other languages. What makes you think you should be > rewriting in JavaScript? I don't understand the answer to this one. If you have a way to parse scripting language s in language X then why would you not use that language to parse scripting languages in the first place? ~~~ lukeschlather > I don't understand the answer to this one. If you have a way to parse > scripting language s in language X then why would you not use that language > to parse scripting languages in the first place? There's also a huge library of code you can use, that would have to be rewritten. I'm saying, why bother with writing an entire server-side program to accomplish something which could be accomplished by writing a single LISP function? ~~~ wodenokoto I was asking the original question and I understand there are benefits to writing a dedicated parser for javascript that can compile as many files as possible at a time. Just for fun, I tried writing a python script that parses javascript like so: [http://dpaste.com/0V4O3C5.txt](http://dpaste.com/0V4O3C5.txt) and it's easy to write and it works ------ davelnewton A script is almost always going to be faster than the tools you're using for parsing. I'm not going to read through the source because it's basically "I used node to read files and run all of them through this thing". Why bother? Look, I get that I'll be reading code, but is there some deeper reason that I have to do this via node? ~~~ lukeschlather It's not exactly about reading code, it's about the fact that there's an existing JavaScript parser, that can run code, that can take code from the browser and use it to do transformations on large scale data. If you have some program that can run JavaScript on the server and then just reads in files as needed to read each script, then why not just write your own program instead? ~~~ davelnewton > If you have some program that can run JavaScript on the server and then just > reads in files as needed to read each script, then why not just write your > own program instead? Because I can't really get the job done with JS. There are no good libraries (node works, but I don't need it). ~~~ lukeschlather I was answering the question about why there isn't a faster and more elegant solution that leverages existing libraries, but here's a few that should be pretty fast to read & execute: [http://www.bcatc.org/jsmin.html](http://www.bcatc.org/jsmin.html) ------ lukethedub Cool project, I'll be checking this out later. It reminds me of python- virtualenv.js I wrote a while ago for minifying Python code: [https://gist.github.com/lukethedub/6f45a6eb3ebb0c795d00](https://gist.github.com/lukethedub/6f45a6eb3ebb0c795d00) I think it's similar to this project, but written in pure JS and uses JSON to interface with the input file. ~~~ k__ I wrote a simple js-vm for my C++/GPG stuff. [https://github.com/k-sax/js-vm/blob/master/js- vm.js](https://github.com/k-sax/js-vm/blob/master/js-vm.js) ------ lukaszg Nice project! My pet project is exactly the same, but in Python: [https://github.com/lukaszgadzior/node- grep/](https://github.com/lukaszgadzior/node-grep/) ~~~ dave_sullivan Yeah, I know lukaszgadzior is a good guy and all that, but it's a