It's been a few months since I last posted something, something that no writer should ever do. My last post on Jan. 20, 2010, described how I handle early morning classes. In the mean time, I have lost all free time. Once classes are finished for the day and my shift at work is done, the few hours I have at night leftover are spent with the girldfriend.
Weekends were usually lost to catching up on sleep, and finding time to head to Jay Peak whenever the conditions were decent. All that to say I have been busy these last few months, adn to day is one of the few days where I have no assignments to work on.
One of my favourite classes is Operating Systems. It of course started with a brief introduction to the Windows command line, with one assignment where we created a simple batch file. Then we moved on to Linux.
All of us have used Linux before, but mostly just on a casual basis; trying it out and comparing to Windows or OSX. I now have a new found respect and appreciation for Linux.
Sed, Grep, and Awk were the starting points of our Linux experience. Which moved to shell scripting. To date, our major scripting assignment was an archiving script, with very strict and precise rules.
The core of the script looked like:
for i in $2/*
do
echo "cat > $i << '!EOF!'"
cat $i
echo "!EOF!"
done
Simple enough. The output of this script was sent to an archive file named in the parameter list.
The tricky part was catching the errors, such an empty source directory, or missing directories along the target file path. All this to say, if (and probably when) I ever have write scripts, I hope it is in Linux, since its command line tools are simple and elegant, yet much more powerful than the command prompt on Windows.
What I wish was covered in more detail, was the boot process, and how to customize how Linux boots up, or how further customize the Linux shell (in our case, we were using Bash, which seems to be the defeault on most Linux/Unix systems). We had ten minute description on Bash environment variables, but that was it.
Though I learned a lot about how powerful Linux is under the hood, it seemed like it was lacking.
Weekends were usually lost to catching up on sleep, and finding time to head to Jay Peak whenever the conditions were decent. All that to say I have been busy these last few months, adn to day is one of the few days where I have no assignments to work on.
One of my favourite classes is Operating Systems. It of course started with a brief introduction to the Windows command line, with one assignment where we created a simple batch file. Then we moved on to Linux.
All of us have used Linux before, but mostly just on a casual basis; trying it out and comparing to Windows or OSX. I now have a new found respect and appreciation for Linux.
Sed, Grep, and Awk were the starting points of our Linux experience. Which moved to shell scripting. To date, our major scripting assignment was an archiving script, with very strict and precise rules.
The core of the script looked like:
for i in $2/*
do
echo "cat > $i << '!EOF!'"
cat $i
echo "!EOF!"
done
Simple enough. The output of this script was sent to an archive file named in the parameter list.
The tricky part was catching the errors, such an empty source directory, or missing directories along the target file path. All this to say, if (and probably when) I ever have write scripts, I hope it is in Linux, since its command line tools are simple and elegant, yet much more powerful than the command prompt on Windows.
What I wish was covered in more detail, was the boot process, and how to customize how Linux boots up, or how further customize the Linux shell (in our case, we were using Bash, which seems to be the defeault on most Linux/Unix systems). We had ten minute description on Bash environment variables, but that was it.
Though I learned a lot about how powerful Linux is under the hood, it seemed like it was lacking.
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