Resume Your Script After Canceling It

Several times in the past I had to write a script that iterates over a dictionary file, or brutes something on a web login or whatever. Often you like to make modifications to the script forcing you to cancel it, edit it, and start it over. The starting over part is what I hate. It took me a while to realize this (I has the dumb) but you can easily create a resume-like function in your scripts. Just use a counter!

For example your original function is something like this:

for thing in things:
    result = haxor_the_thing(thing)
    print("{} resulted in {}".format(thing,result))

Which is your basic for loop in python, nothing new here. But lets say you ran that for a while and it outputted a couple hundred lines. You don't want to start all over again right? You need to make an edit, so you ctrl-c it, edit it, and also add in this little bit:

count = 0
for thing in things:
    if count < 243:
        result = haxor_the_thing(thing)
        print("{} resulted in {}".format(thing,result))
    count += 1

That's it. The "243" is just the number of times it ran and where it should start off again. So what happens here is the script begins, sees the count = 0 and doesnt run the "haxor_the_thing()" function. It won't run it until it sees a value higher than 243, thereby skipping the first 243 entries and restarting the function on the 244th entry.

If I have to cancel it again, I do a quick copy paste of the output, count lines in ST3, and just add "if count < 243 + 534:". This is obviously not the _best_ way to do this, but it sure as hell is fast.

I mean, this may seem obvious to certain people but this makes a person's life much easier.