[adityaathalye]

OP here... As I wrote here, it is better to think of the story as apocryphal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798893

Also of course it will be crazy to read a giant shell script. But then again if the stakes are high enough, and if it yields even one critical piece of information, then it's worth it.

The larger point is that organisational knowledge clings on in strange ways. In a crazy disaster scenario, people may appreciate having access to anything they can get their hands on.

[Gabrys1]

10K lines is not _that_ large. If it was written sensibly, it might be very useful. Bill might have written a text document, but chose to use Shell as a preferred engineers' language. Who doesn't share a one-liner with a colleague in need? Bill shared a 10k-liner :-). And Shell being a relatively high-level language, it probably packs the information more densely than a text file.

[adityaathalye]

True. And let me go a step further to argue that someone so forward-looking as to (allegedly) make a script for an all-caps DISASTER scenario would be intelligent about the contents of said script. They would have cared deeply for their fellow line staff of the then-unknown future.