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by hand: adv. 1. [common] Said of an operation (especially a repetitive, trivial,
and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed automatically by the
computer, but which a hacker instead has to step tediously through.
“My mailer doesn't have a command to include the text of the message
I'm replying to, so I have to do it by hand.” This does not
necessarily mean the speaker has to retype a copy of the message; it might
refer to, say, dropping into a subshell from the mailer, making a copy of
one's mailbox file, reading that into an editor, locating the top and
bottom of the message in question, deleting the rest of the file, inserting
`>' characters on each line, writing the file, leaving the editor,
returning to the mailer, reading the file in, and later remembering to
delete the file. Compare eyeball search. 2. [common] By extension, writing code which does something in an
explicit or low-level way for which a presupplied library routine ought to
have been available. “This cretinous B-tree library doesn't supply a
decent iterator, so I'm having to walk the trees by hand.”
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