Will Keleher shares their experience learning to use sed
and xargs
to find and replace a pattern within a codebase and why XKCD's "Is It Worth It? might not always apply.
I'll sometimes see people reference XKCD's Is It Worth the Time to argue against automating things that would be faster to do manually, and I think that that mindset is a mistake. Automating the easy things is how you build the skills, mindset, and muscle-memory to automate the hard things. There are situations where the only thing that matters is that a task gets accomplished quickly; in those cases, doing it manually can make sense! But a lot of the time, trying to automate builds skill and capability that will come in handy later.
Discovered via Jamie Hannah.
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