A New Approach to Scripting

Scripts are easy to write but hard to write well. Practicing system administrators know that they ought to check all errors and take corrective or abortive action, but such minutiae usually serve as a distraction from the real work the script is supposed to solve, making automation less attractive. Worse, loading up a script with such checks can obscure the flow of the code and lead to spaghetti-script.

It has generally been assumed that accepted programming methodologies for general programming apply to scripting as well. This talk argues that this is not necessarily the case, and will introduce Procedural Test-Oriented Scripting (PTOS), a programming methodology designed to make scripts more readable, resilient, and easier to write by encapsulating a script as a series of conditions that much be reached and steps for bringing them about. An open-source Perl module implementing this methodology, useful for both beginning and advanced system programmers, will be demonstrated.