Scripting Automation

A script written for a one-off task gets run again next week, then gets copied to another team, then ends up wired into a cron job nobody remembers writing. Most ops scripts are, in practice, load -bearing infrastructure that never got the review a production system would get — and the gap between "works when I ran it" and "safe for someone else to run at 3am" is exactly where scripting automation earns its keep.

A script that fails should fail loudly, leave the system in a known state, and tell the next person what happened — an assumption baked in silently is a bug you haven't met yet.

1. Fail loudly and stop, don't limp forward

The default in most shells is to keep going after a command fails, which turns one missing file into a cascade of confusing downstream errors. Explicit failure handling turns "the script did something weird" into "the script told me exactly where it stopped."