A while ago DougWarner had written about <a href="http://www.silfreed.net/blog/346">getting a t-shirt</a> that says 'Failure Is Always An Option'. I made a mental note to check up on that, and then promptly forgot about it. 

<p>
But last night, I was refactoring some code and realized that there was a flip side to 'Failure Is Always An Option', which makes it very much an engineering/planning-oriented saying. The code was:
<pre>
    @transactions = map { `grep BATCH $_` }
        (@ARGV or `find $logdir -ctime -1 -regex .*log -print ` );
    for (@transactions) {
        /$parser/ and do { summarize($1,$2,$3); next };
        /.*/      and do { print }; 
    }
</pre>
Engineering/planning emphasizes identifying (and within a budget trying to handle) all the cases that could occur to a given system. Naturally, some of these cases will lead to system failure, Not A Good Thing&trade;. So you had better be aware of all the failure-causing states. 
</p>

<p>So after that 'oh, Yeah!' moment had passed, my code now reads:
<pre>
    @transactions = map { `grep BATCH $_` }
        (@ARGV or `find $logdir -ctime -1 -regex .*log -print ` );
    for (@transactions) {
        /$parser/ and do { summarize($1,$2,$3); next };
        /.*/      and do { print }; # failure is always an option
    }
</pre>
</p>