Common scripting mistakes

Writing a script will present many problems, including how to design it, how to find the right solutions to different problems, and how to make all of this usable in the target environment. These can be things you can easily solve in a couple of minutes, or things you will spend days or even weeks trying to solve. All this time will probably just be a small percentage of the total time you will spend debugging and troubleshooting scripts. Writing and troubleshooting scripts are two wholly different things – while you usually write your own scripts from scratch, you will not only debug and troubleshoot your own code.

Writing requires skill and deep knowledge of your environment, but it can be argued that to debug and troubleshoot, you need even more understanding of both your task and the way your script is trying to accomplish it. In this recipe, we are going to work on the skills you need to understand not only how to troubleshoot scripts you have...