Moving to the Linux® Business Desktop

Appendix B. Automation and Scripting

I've joked for years that system administrators are notoriously lazy people. They will work impossibly long hours late into the night with the sole intention of automating a process so they never have to do the work again. That is precisely the kind of system administrator I have always been—which means I pay for my laziness by constantly working to find ways to not work. I am not alone in thinking this way. Larry Wall, the perl guru, claims that laziness is one of the three great virtues of a programmer. I say “administrator.” He says “programmer.”

As support for this claim regarding the virtue of laziness, I did a quick search on a popular Internet search engine recently using the words “laziness,” “system,” ...