Unix sysadmins to watch out for

[yesthattom]

A friend of mine wrote:

He actually admits that he doesn’t know shell scripting. In his own words he knows “very little”. I don’t think he installed the applications from source, just used pre packaged open source applications.

To me it’s like a Windows admin that doesn’t know how to write a batch file, or doesn’t use keyboard shortcuts at all. It’s worrying me more and more.

Wow. I couldn’t have summed it up better myself. We have berthed a generation of Linux users none of know how to do the fundamental thing that makes Unix Unix: Scripting.

My question for my readers is this: What books do a good job in this area?

Comments

[mcl.livejournal.com]

I find Wolfram's "A New Science" is just thick enough to take one out with only one or two swings at the head.

[disappearinjon.livejournal.com]

Mine, I think, does exactly that in re scripting. (I certainly don't cover building software from source --- that's beyond the scope of what I cover.) If you've forgotten, Think Unix, Que, 2000. Still in print, and still ranked just over 80,000 on Amazon after four years. (I'm pretty proud of that, actually...) You have a copy of it that I gave you, yes?

My book isn't a sysadmin book, but I consider it a power-user book, or a sysadmin prerequisite refresher course.

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

There is the "Teach Yourself Unix Shell Programming in 14 days" book I have on my shelf. It is a Sams book. Simple and easy to follow for someone just getting into the subject.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Eh. I freely tell people I don't know shell scripting. I'm complete ass with syntax and I've needed a reference (usually I use the contents of /etc/init.d) for every single thing I've written over the last 9 years. It doesn't mean that I haven't written some fairly involved and useful stuff, but it does mean I'll fail a phone screen on it. Ditto with perl (if the situation is not in fact worse there, since I write in perl every single damn day -- and pretty much have continuously since 1997 or so -- and still can't get the syntax to sink in).

Interestingly I somehow don't have this problem with C or make, but I'd be the last person to call myself a proficient C programer or makefile guru, either.

Shell Vs. Perl

[dballing.livejournal.com]

I started my career as a Perl programmer, not a UNIX Admin, so I've found that where some people would write a shell script which goes out and calls a bunch of standard UNIX commands like sed and awk, I find myself just "thinking of the problem in perl terms" and writing a short perl program to do the same thing.

If you're in an environment where Perl is predominantly available, as in any modern UNIX/Linux shop, I personally think this is better, especially for shorter-than-six-lines type stuff, because you eliminate a bunch of fork/exec overhead.

Just my $0.02 worth.

[cpj.livejournal.com]

Here are qualities of sysadmins I hate. Unfortunately, I see these traits at work, and in software I occasionally use.

1. Develop for Linux, and nothing else (Oh, this package needs GNU m4, and GNU bison, and GNU cron, and GNU shit). I mean I can handle GCC, but what the hell did they do to make their software so dependent on GNU/Linux.

2. Full applications installed in /usr/local, instead of /opt (w /etc/opt and /var/opt).

3. Logfiles under /usr

4. No shell scripting skills.

5. People who don't understand the init.d startup scripts. IE, they never put the original in /etc/init.d/, or to deactivate it, they shange S15nfs.server to s15nfs.server.

Actually, that first one is developers

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

1. Develop for Linux, and nothing else (Oh, this package needs GNU m4, and GNU bison, and GNU cron, and GNU shit). I mean I can handle GCC, but what the hell did they do to make their software so dependent on GNU/Linux.

Sysadmins rarely develop packages. However, I feel your pain -- my main systems are
Solaris, FreeBSD and NetBSD derivatives. Trying to install docbook was quite a frustrating
exercise.

Worse, people assume Linux/X86 in particular (granted, the *BSD variants are much more
portable than Linux, but Linux does actually run on several different platforms). And they
just assume I have a parallel port to play with (nope, the only computers I have with
parallel ports are the Masscomp and the Sparc-5, and they don't support the kind of
bit-banging in use here).

[rainbear.livejournal.com]

Eh, I never considered myself 'off-the-top-of-my-head proficient' in shell, but I generally can get the info I need off of other scripts, man sh, or google. Reading some of the scripts in that book I told you about a while ago, Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1593270127/qid=1095609602/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/102-0651414-7329757?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) helps too. (It's always good to see good examples of what you're trying to do, etc...)

[ayse.livejournal.com]

Well, you basically have a choice: non-technical users can stick to Windows, making that the default and dominant operating system, or you can accept that people will run Linux and not have loads of tecnical background while doing so. And some people will get enough experience to keep a machine running without needing shell scripting.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Y'know, aside from #1 and #4 (and I can be flexible on #4, if the job description is more data-centery), I feel like some of the others are more site-policy issues or even deploying-stupid-product issues than sysadmin issues (I know our product used to insist on keeping its logs in its own directory, maybe it still does). #5 doesn't even phase me, it's a lot better in my opinion than just deleting the files, which I've also seen.

[moose]

I am the world's crappiest shell scripter.

I do not known Perl, Python, or C. I can read C. Kinda. I am kinda looking at Python now, but I'm having the eternal problem.

I Cannot Code. I have been trying to learn since 1977. I'm missing some bit in my brain that says, "Oh, *THAT*'s how you do that!"

I can take 3 weeks to do in Bourne what anyone else can do in 3 hours.

I can install 3rd party software. I can use Make, I can hack together a simple Makefile and sometimes fix a pre-existing one if it's not too complicated.

But even if I learn Python, I will be The World's Crappiest Python Scripter.

And I just lost out on yet another job because I do not have strong scripting skills. And I never will.

I need a new career, I think....

[awfief.livejournal.com]

The 2 books I've found most useful are "Unix Shells by Example" and "Unix for the Impatient".

More importantly, though, we've birthed a generation of Linux users none of whom know how to do the fundamental thing that makes Unix Unix --

AUTOMATION.