Core Skills: Scripting for Automation

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.

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 •nix are assumed. Attendees will need to bring a laptop with OS X, Linux, or FreeBSD installed to complete in-class tasks. Time in the LISA lab will also be scheduled to complement this class.

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:
Understanding of common scripting patterns and techniques

Topics include:
An understanding of how to apply standard utilities in your scripts, along with recipes for automating typical administration tasks.