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0 pointsatoav3y ago0 comments

One thing not in the xkcd is "how much time it takes you to make the script".

Let's say there is some weird service that you sometimes need to manually restart in a very specific order for maintenance. The hard (time intensive) task is figuring out the right incantations and the order to do it. It is however not time intesive at all to store those incantations in a shell script.

So not saving that in a script risks you (or a co-worker) having to go through this again, potentially missing some important aspect and wasting time and energy.

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bluepnume3y ago· 1 in thread

Isn't that exactly what the xkcd covers?

atoavOP3y ago

Sure in a sense, but my feeling is that this is often taken too literally.

Sometimes the work is "making the script beautiful and universal" and then you should indeed consult that xkcd.

Sometimes the work is spitting the commands you had to figure out anyways into a shell script in 5 seconds. Then it is a no brainer to do it, because it will safe you time even if you use it only once.

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