I'm taking classes in the motion graphics and animation software Adobe After Effects. It needs a cache, and I've put its cache on an external hard drive, to avoid wasting laptop drive space. But I sometimes forget to plug that hard drive in, with the very annoying result that After Effects "helpfully" informs me that it's using a new cache location. I then immediately quit After Effects, plug in the hard drive, re-launch the software, and re-supply the correct cache location in the application's preferences.
Obviously, the solution was to remove After Effects from the OS X Dock, which is a crime against user experience anyway, and replace the dock's launcher icon with a shell script. The shell script only launches After Effects if the relevant hard drive is present and accounted for.
("Vanniman Time Machine" is the name of the hard drive,
because reasons.)