On 2006.12.18 07:10 john gibbons wrote:
Many thanks for the trouble you have gone to, Sonia. Sounds about right. I had a quick look at the references you supplied and experienced only mild insecurity instead of the usual outright horror, so it should be a practical solution.
One matter that has not been addressed by your respondents is the incredible level of support that can be found here at SLUG and at the other LUGs. Just about every sysadmin on the planet (other than those unfortunates who only administer Window$ boxen) uses shell scripting on a daily basis.
If you get stuck you can post a question here and, within hours, you will get answers -- some of them in the language/shell of your request, and others in almost every known lang/shell. There are however two caveats to posting any programming question: first, advise that you are NOT doing last week's programming course assignment; and, secondly, tell everyone what steps you have taken and (if known) why they didn't work. The second is particularly important, otherwise you may get caustic replies such as "RTFM" and "Google is your Friend" :-)
Having said all that, I should like to endorse Sonia's remarks -- particularly if your requirement is for parsing output produced by another source (eg, a program). Shell scripting is very easy to learn, can do quite complex routines in its own right, but when coupled with sed and awk can do *anything* that can be done by the other scripting languages -- usually easier, better, and just as fast. Further, the Internet abounds with shell one-liners (that can be up to six line long!) that perform complex manipulations.
I am a 60 tear old who lives in the bush and is totally self taught. I know no programming languages at all, but I can do almost anything I want by using a combination of bash, sed and awk. As a "proof of concept" I wrote a bash script for writing a letter on "letterhead" paper, using dialog boxes for input and groff for typesetting -- I now use my script in preference to firing up Open Office!
Robert Thorsby Robert Thorsby -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
