Few years ago I wrote a simple bash script to generate employee codes for future project management systems. Now, that the time has come to create a system that must be able to generate employee codes automatically, I realized that it is more elegant to generate employee codes directly with PL/SQL functions so the script has become completely useless. I was going to delete it permanently from my filesystem, but then checked the code and decided to post it here because it is a simple but perfect example of how fast problems can be solved using Linux bash only. Experts can skip this post because probably it will show nothing new for them.