Why are scripts needlessly complex?

Tonight i’m restoring an environment to another server as a test.   The source server is support by another group, so they use their own scripts to backup the database.  Before I started the restore I took a look at the scripts to see how its being backed up, file locations,etc and what I found utterly shocked me.

To backup one database there were at least 6 scripts scheduled in cron with a line count of almost 600 lines!   I couldn’t believe it.    I try to keep things as simple as possible.  For example, here is one of my backup scripts:

   1:  #!/bin/sh

   2:  . /home/oracle/.bash_profile

   3:  . /usr/local/bin/oraenv << END

   4:  ORCL

   5:  END

   6:   

   7:  cd /home/oracle/scripts

   8:  logfile=/home/oracle/scripts/log/rman_ORCL_LVL0.log.`date '+%d%m%y'`

   9:   

  10:  rman target / nocatalog CMDFILE /home/oracle/scripts/rman_ORCL_LVL0.sql LOG $logfile

  11:  status=$?

  12:   

  13:  if [ $status -gt 0 ] ; then

  14:     mailx -s "[BACKUP][FAILED] ORCL LVL0" me@myemail.com <<!

  15:  `cat $logfile`

  16:  !

  17:  else

  18:      mailx -s "[BACKUP][SUCCESS] ORCL LVL0" me@myemail.com <<!

  19:  `cat $logfile`

  20:  !

  21:  fi

  22:   

  23:  echo "Backup files removed (4+ days OLD):"

  24:  echo `find /u03/backup/ORCL  -mtime +4 -print`

  25:  find /u03/backup/ORCL -type f -mtime +4 -exec rm -f {} \;

  26:   

  27:  echo "Archive logs removed (2+ days OLD):"

  28:  echo `find /u03/archive/ORCL  -mtime +2 -print`

  29:  find /u03/archive/ORCL -type f -mtime +2 -exec rm -f {} \;

It doesn’t get much simpler than that.  I send emails both on SUCCESS and FAIL of the backup because i've seen cron stop working before.   I have filters in my mail client to separate them into different folders.  Each day I checked for failed backups and periodically I check successful folder to make sure my backups are working properly.   The rman_ORCL_LVL0.sql file basically contains:  unneedlessly

backup
   incremental level 0
   database
   tag 'ORCL_LVL0';

I know there are exceptions but in this case these databases are small and have simple backup requirements.  Yeah, I could spend a bit of time to put in variables so its more generic but I don’t manage hundreds of databases so thats not a huge concern.  

As for the original 600 lines of scripts… Yeah, its very generic, handles a multitude of scenarios and probably even does your laundry but its worthless IMHO if it can’t be quickly understood.  The last thing I want to be doing at 3am in the morning is trying to figure out someones scripts because I was the lucky person on call.