I recently needed to make a set of several favicons, so I went to the web to see if anyone had a script I could borrow steal.

Sure enough, I found one written by Joshua McGee: “Create a favicon with ImageMagick” (not reproduced here for copyright reasons).

It was a simple enough script, just a series of escaped commands. I noticed, however, that it assumed a few things:

• An image file was specified on the command line,
• The image existed, and
• Imagemagik was installed.

In other words, the script was not developed defensively. This makes sense: it was just a bang-out.

The script had no inline documentation^†, and if a favicon file that already existed in the current directory would be silently overwritten—not good.

I’m clumsy: I delete and overwrite files all the time, so I could use a little help. Maybe I can tidy up the script? (more…)