It took me way too many years to figure out that any management script I write for myself and my co-workers should, by default, execute as a dry run operation.

It took me way too many years to figure out that any management script I write for myself and my co-workers should, by default, execute as a dry run operation. I now put a -e/--execute flag on every destructive command; without that, the script will conduct some basic sanity checks and halt before making changes.