[ILUG] barcode reader. Don't want to reinvent the wheel.

[Darragh Ó Héiligh]

Morning all,

I'm thinking of creating a bash script to help with reading and
logging barcodes.

At the moment, I have a spreadsheet with about seven sheets with each
sheet signifying a room. Within each sheet, I have box numbers and
tapes within each box.  If I want to know what box and room a
particular tape is in, I search the entire workbook for the barcode
that has been requested by the restore process in the backup software
and then find the box and room that it's in.  It's taken about a week
to invintory all four thousand plus tapes and put them into this
format so I don't really want to enter them into a database manually.

I would really like to create a script that made the process of
searching for a tape as quick and easy as possible. The only prompt in
the script should ask for the barcode.  If two tapes are found with
the bar code, i.e, I've made a mistake and after a restore request I
haven't put the tape back in it's origional box then the script should
return all tapes found with that barcode.


I'd also like to make it easier to input new tapes and boxes into the
spreadsheet as well.  so, I need to know how to write to a
spreadsheet.

I'm not so worried about that, but my question is has this been done
already?  Is there a package that will do this?

Before I took over the management of backups they just had boxes with
the barcode range written on the outside of *some* of the boxes.
Finding a tape for a restoration was a slow and painful process.  With
this system, all be it reasonably simple, finding one tape or a range
of tapes is very easy.

Thank god for handheld barcode scanners! Without this one I'd never be
able to manage this amount of tapes.

My last question is a long shot.  Have any of you been able to
interface with the cut down version of SQL that Backup Exec uses?
There are tapes here from 8 years ago but I cant say with full
certainty what is old and what isn't until I can manually search the B
E database and find the date that each tape was used and for what type
of backup it was used for.

Sorry for the long message.


Darragh
www.digitaldarragh.com