Automation is critical to surviving your system administration career with your sanity, hair, and systems intact. If you can automate some or all of a task, then you stand to make considerable gains in personal productivity, task repeatability, and system predictability.
So how can you achieve this state of Nirvana? The answer is, by scripting.
This class is a practical crash course in how, using a combination of bash, Perl, and friends, you can write useful scripts that solve real-world system administration problems.
Please note that this is a hands-on class. A basic understanding of programming ("What's a loop?") and how to edit files in your favorite flavor of U*X are assumed. Attendees will need to bring a laptop with OS X, Linux, or FreeBSD installed to complete in-class tasks.
if there is sufficient interest, we will schedule a BoF for scripting challenges, where we can work them out interactively as a group.
Who should attend:
Junior and intermediate sysadmins who are new to scripting or would like to create scripts to reliably automate sysadmin tasks.
Take back to work:
An understanding of how to apply standard utilities in your scripts, along with recipes for automating typical administration tasks.
Topics include:
Controlling programs and processes
Script building blocks
Searching
Working with data
Pipes and performance
Tying them all together to write effective scripts
