So, someone showed me a script they were writing in bash. They were doing a lot of manual menu creation, then using “read” to collect input, and manually mapping the input to longer strings, and then doing string manipulation stuff. Trying to help simplify and make things a little more sane and readable, I discovered…
Category: Scripting
More Lessons in Freelancing
So, I’ve been freelancing now for 9 months. I did a post a while back about what was working and what wasn’t, and I still stand by those recommendations. But that was over 6 months ago. Since then a lot of things have happened. I’m happy to report that, so far, things are going great….
‘Beginning Linux Administration’, Now With Open Enrollment
So, my training business is doing better than expected, which is good news in a tough economy. I’ve gotten some feedback from readers about my mention of training services offered through my company. My company has historically only performed training at client sites, and some folks had hoped I would expand into offering “open enrollment”…
What’s Missing From the Linux Training Landscape?
Everyone please also point this article at the managers who purchase training for your company or team, and other people you know who’ve had Linux training. So, a very large part of my business is providing Linux training. Up to now, I have performed only on-site training, often times developing custom training content for clients…
Activity Lapse: I blame Twitter
To all my geek/nerd friends in the blogosphere: I’ll be posting updates on Fedora Directory Server, my Linux training courses, and more in the coming weeks, but I wanted to let you know that I’ve recently been stricken with… umm… Twitter. I’m @bkjones on twitter, so if you’re into beer, brewing, billiards, cooking, guitar/music, linux,…
Two extremely handy geek URLs
I know, I know. I haven’t been posting nearly enough. But I did come across two URLs that are too handy not to pass on: Command-line-fu: this is a repository of handy one-liners submitted by pretty much anyone. You can log in with OpenID or register on the site itself. I expect this, or something…
Fedora Directory Server on RHEL 4 and 5, Pt. 1
The last time I had to do a NIS->LDAP migration, it was in a heterogenous environment with Solaris and Linux boxes, and it was around 2004 or so. Although I hit some rough patches adjusting to changes in how FDS is packaged, the community was awesome, and helped me get back up to speed in…
Marc Andreessen on Everything
Marc Andreessen was on Charlie Rose last night, and I missed it. A buddy told me about it, and I wanted to watch, but things just got in the way. So here it is. So, this is the very first time I’ve ever embedded video into a blog post. I couldn’t help myself. Why? I’ve…
Throw out your Perl: One-line aggregation in awk
I ran into a student from a class I taught last summer. He’s a really sharp guy, and when I first met him, I was impressed with just how much Perl he could stuff into his brain’s cache. He would write what he called ‘one-liners’ in Perl that, in reality, took up 5-10 lines in…
Shell Scripting: Bash Arrays
I’m actually not a huge fan of shell scripting, in spite of the fact that I’ve been doing it for years, and am fairly adept at it. I guess because the shell wasn’t really intended to be used for programming per se, it has evolved into something that sorta kinda looks like a programming language…