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.

So how can you achieve this state of nirvana? The answer is 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 •nix 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.