Home ›

Weird, geeky shell script projects?

Nov 30, 2007  By Dave Taylor

Alright, LJ readers and fellow Linux-heads, I'm asking for suggestions: what should I write about in the next few columns of my shell script programming column in the mag? I can certainly come up with stuff, but I think it'd be interesting to actually hear from y'all. So let me know! :-)

______________________

Dave Taylor has been hacking shell scripts for over thirty years. Really.
He's the author of the popular "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts" and
can be found on Twitter as @DaveTaylor and more generally at
www.DaveTaylorOnline.com.

  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • SlashDot
  • StumbleUpon
  • Post to Twitter

Comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Can you live without it?

Patrício Batista's picture
Submitted by Patrício Batista (not verified) on Mon, 12/03/2007 - 06:15.

I sure can’t! Shell scripting saved me from so much tedious work during my sysadmin tasks.
Once I’ve used it to check the true resolution in more than 2000 image files, with some help from our most precious awk, sed, cat, wc, etc.

BASHing myself in the head

Shawn Powers's picture
Submitted by Shawn Powers on Fri, 11/30/2007 - 06:47.

I have a buddy that is a shell scripting guru. It seems that every time I need to solve a problem, he can send me a snippet of code 3 lines long that I tried to solve with 300 lines. And his works, where mine failed.

I also have a tendency to forget about the "testing" phase of shell scripting, and I have rm -rf'd my way out of a perfectly good weekend.

So while I don't have any real suggestions, whatever you end up writing, please know that dolts like me enjoy your column, even if my actual shell scripting is usually a stop-gap or an attempt to do something automatically that would take 40 years manually.

See there, I'm no help at all. :)

Shawn Powers is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel, or Twitter

White Paper
More Resources
Fabric-Based Computing Enables Optimized Hyperscale Data Centers

Today’s modular x86 servers are compute-centric, designed as a least common denominator to support a wide range of IT workloads. Those generic, virtualized IT workloads have much different resource optimization requirements than hyperscale and cloud applications. They have resulted in a “one size fits all” enterprise IT architecture that is not optimized for a specific set of IT workloads, and especially not emerging hyperscale workloads, such as web applications, big data, and object storage. In this report, you will learn how shifting the focus from traditional compute-centric IT architectures to an innovative disaggregated fabric-based architecture can optimize and scale your data center.

Learn More

Sponsored by AMD

White Paper
More Resources
Red Hat White Paper: Using an Open Source Framework to Catch the Bad Guy

Built-in forensics, incident response, and security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn more about catching the bad guy in this free white paper.

Learn More

Sponsored by DLT Solutions