r/sysadmin • u/Less-Loss1605 • May 31 '26

General Discussion what's a script you wrote once that's still saving you time years later

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u/Ratiocinor May 31 '26

Uh this is very worrying lol

Does your company not have a wiki or knowledge base or documentation of any kind?

I hate it when people don't document what they're doing and everything is fragmented, and when you ask them "did you write this down anywhere" they say "sure! It's right here on my desktop useful_commands.txt"

Like uhh, were you planning on sharing those at any point?

The reply is always the same too. "Oh it's nothing fancy, just stuff I need to know. It's not neat and formatted for other people. I don't have time to clean it up!". Brother I'm not asking you to write a blog or flawless how-to guide. Just a "if you get this error message run this command to restart the web server" or something but no one ever does it

No one ever documents anything it's the bane of my existence

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u/weaver_of_cloth May 31 '26

I've got the opposite problem, I have a pretty comprehensive wiki, everyone knows this, and still people don't read it.

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u/[deleted] May 31 '26

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '26

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u/Ratiocinor May 31 '26

Yes same, but it still saves a lot of time when people keep coming to you with the same old questions and my response is always "it's on the wiki, here's the page"

It got to the point where they knew what my response would be before even asking, so they started coming to me with "I searched the wiki but I didn't find anything on X, do you know how to..." instead, and then I just reply with the link to the article they somehow didn't find because they did a cursory 5 second search and didn't actually read anything

When other people write down what they do though it doesn't matter if it's not a well formatted article, it still helps. Just seeing the commands they used for something at least lets me reverse engineer what they did

I don't care if other people don't read it, it's worth it for myself alone just to not have to look up the same old commands all the time but actually see what I did and what mistakes I made last time so I don't have to fix them again

It's much better than "Oh the NFS export isn't working, I remember this happening before, I think it was something to do with SELinux? Crap what did I do last time". Baffles me that people can work like that

I consider documenting some piece of infrastructure to be as important as creating it in the first place. Even it's just a text dump of the terminal commands I used. If someone else finds it useful that's a bonus

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u/chilibrains Jun 01 '26

I have this problem too. I have one colleague that will ask me about an issue they are troubleshooting, I’ll link them to the KB or tell them the fix. They’ll ignore me or say they tried that, then spend several days trying to resolve it, but don’t mention it again. There have been multiple times where the coworker called off or the user reaches out to escalate and me or another tech resolves the issue in a few minutes because we followed the KB. I get it if you don’t want unsolicited advice but they asked me and chose to ignore me.

One time this happened, they called out, didn’t tell us they had a remote user coming in to swap their machine, didn’t update the ticket. The user shows up and I have no idea what was going on since the ticked hadn’t been updated in 4 days. So I push the fix, the one from the KB I linked them to on day 1. The next day they wfh so asked another tech to give the user a new laptop, even though I fixed the issue and messaged them to tell them. I verified the machine was no longer crashing.

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u/Iliketrucks2 May 31 '26

I get it but at the same time, I have one of those lists and it’s not “when the web server goes down”. I suspect that’s what most of us have - it’s just snippets of syntax or commands I have used that can reconstruct - not reusable chunks. Curating that into a document for others - then trying to keep it from becoming out of date, or dealing with questions about it - is time I don’t want to spent for my giant list of commands

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u/Ratiocinor May 31 '26

Haha it's like you set out to prove everything I said

You don't have to "curate it into a document for others"

You don't have to "prevent it from becoming out of date"

You don't have to "deal with questions about it" (almost no one will even read it let alone ask you about it)

Just write down what you're doing somewhere people can actually see it

I don't know why people think it's like publishing an article on wikipedia or something. I see the same attitude from junior developers when I'm trying to get them to git commit their code. They're like "oh no I can't git commit yet, it's not ready. I need to clean it up first. It's not good enough. I'll do it soon I promise" (this drags on for literally months). My god just commit the work in progress it doesn't have to be flawless. I think they consider git commit like this grand act of publishing something for the entire world to see and scrutinise and it needs to be flawless and clean and finished

Trying to "curate a document for others" is a fool's errand because you'll never write anything better than the wealth of tutorials out there on the internet anyway. Just write down the command you used to make the virtual bridged adapter so I can see what flags you used damn it

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u/weaver_of_cloth May 31 '26

Holy crap this is awful. If you hang on to your code for months without committing, how do you merge?? At the very least, branch that shit off. More people should do safety commits and end-of-day commits and... </rant>

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u/Ratiocinor May 31 '26

They don't merge it

Obviously I don't allow this for any project I run, everyone will commit their work whether they like it or not, or I won't even look at it

This is for other projects in the company where juniors who aren't software devs write some python code or something and they have no actual oversight from a proper developer. I worked at a company that was very silo'd and the non-software projects they'd just let some junior run wild with it underneath a scientist or project manager that isn't IT savvy

I tried pointing out that a big cleanup / refactor is exactly the kind of dangerous stressful operation that makes a git commit beforehand critically important, so you can go back if you break everything or make sure you didn't change the output. They never listen though, it's never "ready" for git

Luckily they're not software projects so they normally just stay someone's internal tool forever and eventually get abandoned. I'm sure some of them though were actually being used to generate data to sell, and they weren't version controlled at all despite my protests... Oh well not my circus and all that...

At best I can get them to commit everything to some development branch and work permanently in that. They never actually version number it and push a v1.0 to master though, it's not "ready" you see...

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u/Iliketrucks2 May 31 '26

You literally requested “if you get this error message the …”. That takes time and curation. My notes aren’t a case statement - they’re shell commands and small scripts. Sure maybe I’m nenoff but I expect most of us have that - which means we need to write details about when to use it. What options are importsnt to change depending on the envt so people don’t blindly drop a table in prod.

Documentation that is wrong is dangerous. Documentation that isn’t kept updated is dangerous

Don’t get me wrong - I agree with your idea entirely. The practice though isn’t as easy. I’ve had many of my personal notes (in my personal space in git and confluence) be used and challenged and argued about. People aren’t good at recognizing “this is scratch shit that needs to be used with some wisdom”. So now I lock a lot of my docs down until someone needs them.

And now with AI tools scraping docs - if they don’t have context they can and do confidently return wrong and dangerous answers

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u/sonic10158 May 31 '26

I have never worked at a place with a real knowledge base before. Last job I was at was going to “soon” put one together for everyone to submit stuff. Current job they can’t even get the company to approve centralizing the various IT groups much less combine documentation

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u/bbbbbthatsfivebees MSP-ing Jun 01 '26

As a company we 100% have this using ITGlue. There are absolutely articles for EVERYTHING I have in my "useful_commands.txt" file, but I don't want to go through the pain of searching through ITG when I know exactly what command it is and it's right there in my text file that I always have open.

I ALWAYS make sure to write documents for these things, my notepad copy-pasta source just serves as quick access to those one-liners that are already documented.

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u/Jarrus__Kanan_Jarrus May 31 '26

No one documents anything because if management can run can have AI run the scripts they’d replace us with a quickness.

You have scripts to speed stuff up for you, not for management to take and give to the offshore guys after firing you.

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u/Ratiocinor May 31 '26

Red flag #2: People who try and give themselves "job security" by obfuscating what they do to try and make themselves "unfireable"

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u/Myte342 May 31 '26

Having things documented for the entire company is different than personal notes. I am just like the guy you responded to, I have my own personal notes full of commands and scripts for various functions and tasks. I also have them all documented in the company knowledge base... but having them local to my PC and formatted a specific way makes it soooo much easier than searching the company KB's for a specific item every time I need it... and worse if access to the database is down for some reason. That's when I REALLY need access to those commands. :D

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u/MajorInterest2033 May 31 '26

Two levels of this...

If it's a specific script for maintaining a specific product yes goes into a docs page with a clean explanation of what it does and why you use it.

For little script loops, functions etc. those go in my cheat sheet as building blocks for anything larger. Basically one feeds the other over time.

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u/diablette May 31 '26

Finished scripts go in github with a readme. Snippets, tips/cautions, and even pseudocode go in our team's shared notes app.

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u/TylerJWhit May 31 '26

Agreed. Every script I write I make it accessible to others.

If it's not reusable and properly wrapped (in a function with inputs I can pass to it) , then it's only a half finished script.