[SLL] System Administration Scripting

[Artie Ziff]

> O'Reilly to the rescue: "Perl for System Administration: Managing
> Multiplatform Environments with Perl" David N. Blank-Edelman
>
>
>   
Unless that book has been revised, I would avoid it. IIRC, it was
considered to be a poor treatment of Perl. Besides, if you have not
sufficiently learned Bourne-based shell programming, then Perl is going
to make your life harder and confuse you even more. Perl has a lot of
features to create confusing (unreadable) code; more so than Bourne
shell derivatives.


>> I have read a number of intro books on Perl, Python, and bash, and am able
>>  to digest the concepts for the most part.  The problem with most of these
>>  books is that their examples don't really relate to system administration
>>  tasks.  It would be great if there was a book written on scripting for
>>  System Administrators who don't have experience in the field of
>>  programming.  Does anyone know of a book or good resource that can help a
>>  scripting phobic person like myself using real world examples starting
>>  from easy to moderate?
>>     

Try the book by Bruce Blinn: "Portable Shell Programming"
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0134514947/>


The forums at <http://www.unix.com> are helpful.
Read them.

Study the numerous bash/sh/ksh resources which are freely available on
the Net.

Also, run your code through all three interpreters (sh, ksh93, bash v3).
Debug whatever does not work and you will learn more of what you are
seeking.

> ... Just piecing these together has been a
> great learning experience.  
Well, that's programming!  Congratulations. :)
That is... taking snippets of idioms you find elsewhere, and working
them into your script.
Sounds like you are doing the right thing. Good luck.


AZ