Before long, every Linux user accumulates little command snippets. A clever find pipeline copied from a forum. A five-line shell script that renames photographs. An awk one-liner that extracts exactly the report you need. The question is not whether you will collect these solutions. The question is whether you will lose them.

In a previous post, I discussed handling personal frustration through building my own utility, and learning programming in the process. The question now is: at what point should a group of commands, ofen represented as one-liners, be turned into a script?