by hand

1. 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. 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."

[Jargon File]