You know what is so freaking hard about this- You do *not* know how long something is going to be around.

Most of my perl/sh/whatever stuff start out as hacks.- Today I try to keep a clear eye for the needs that come through my desk- for thihngs that may turn out to be more then hacks later..
When I get people telling me "there's a wrong character on the second paragraph in one thousand files in the document server" (oversimplification) the second time around, maybe that last script needs to be beefed up.

It sometimes happens the hacks you leave behind, someone else uses them- That makes me cringe and think 'oh my Jean Paul Belmondo tell me that wasn't write_random_bits_2disk.pl '

A better real world example is the auto sorting system we have. Files all get put into one directory, and according to funny chars, new dirs get created, etc.
I did not anticipate this would be used not just a second time, but get inside a regular cron. It's crearly time to make sure that thing has some documentation for the next poor b85tard that comes along.

But if I made full documentation for every hack.. then froget it. Nothing gets done. It may be be different in a working office environment (perl what? is that a mac?) from a primarily development oriented environment.