Re:Automation is the serialization of understanding
by nonrandomstring on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @04:44AM
(#31094270)
A practice I've found valuable in the past is the script command.
SCRIPT(1) script - make typescript of terminal session
Manually run through a process over and over, checking the
intermediate outcomes until its right and tight. Then take the last
iteration from script and make that into a shell script. After testing
an tweaking few more times now make that portable in a system language
of your choice. A kludge I frequently used was just copy it to a Perl
file as back-quoted script lines, then replace each with a proper
statement, same thing works with python calling process/system/exec
things that return proper exit values.
Dirty, mechanical, industrial programming. No elegance in sight. But
it works reliably in most cases and leaves an understandable trail for
debug.
SCRIPT(1) script - make typescript of terminal session
Manually run through a process over and over, checking the intermediate outcomes until its right and tight. Then take the last iteration from script and make that into a shell script. After testing an tweaking few more times now make that portable in a system language of your choice. A kludge I frequently used was just copy it to a Perl file as back-quoted script lines, then replace each with a proper statement, same thing works with python calling process/system/exec things that return proper exit values.
Dirty, mechanical, industrial programming. No elegance in sight. But it works reliably in most cases and leaves an understandable trail for debug.