NewsForge has been running a series ofarticles by Brian Warshawsky on the 'Ten Commandments of systemadministration'. His tenth commandment is 'Thou shalt not waste timedoing repetitive and mundane tasks' (article here ,with links to the other nine), where he tells people to automate suchtasks through shell scripts.

There's a number of good reasons to follow this advice; for a start,writing shell scripts is probably less boring than doing these mundanetasks over and over. But there's a slightly

One of the stock pieces of advice about writing Python code is thatbasic error checks should be handled by catching the exception thattrying to do the operation generates, instead of through explicitchecks beforehand. For example, if you are getting the value for a keyfrom a dictionary (what some other languages call a hash), you don'tbother checking to see if the key is in the dictionary beforehand; youjust try to get the value.

This code might be written like this (especially in examples)

Last night I shuffled our antispam rules to put checking the CBL before everything, including our per-IP-address greylisting.

Since 3:20am this morning, 83% of the connect-time SMTP rejectionswere due to the CBL, for 88% of the IP addresses (4,180 out of 5,000rejections from 3,038 different IP addresses out of 3,455).

So the simple recommendation seems to be: if you can