[Courses] [Basics] Dear participants...

[Raven, corporate courtesan]

Heya --

	Slowly catching up on mail...

	Thanks for the lessons, Sonja.  This course is really helping
me; I feel like it's explaining some of the
stuff-everything-else-assumes.  (In particular, the command/word
discussion made me go, "Ohhhh, now I get it!")

Quoth Sonja Krause-Harder (Sat, Apr 06, 2002 at 02:12:28PM +0200):
> After that, I want to use real, useful and working scripts as examples as 
> soon as possible. I'd therefore like to know: what kind of scripts do you 
> need or would you like to have? What recurring tasks would be great to 
> have scripts do for you? What can be automated in your daily work? And, 
> out of sheer curiousity: why do you want to learn to program, what future
> projects do you have in mind?

	Most of the stuff that I need to be able to script is network
and system admin stuff.  Recently my company changed domain names.  I
had to log in to every one of our Unix boxes individually and make sure
that hostname, /etc/hostname.hme0, /etc/nodename, /etc/resolv.conf, and
/etc/hosts all contained the new domain name rather than the old one.
That would have been easier to do with a script, but I didn't trust my
scripting skills enough to depend on that.  (At least, not in the day we
had to do it.  If I'd had a few spare hours to develop and test, sure.
But not in the "need it now" situation it was.)

	I'd like to be able to run netstat and other similar commands
every few minutes, to track the average number of connections that my
servers are handling.

	I'd like to get better at writing scripts that work with extant
tools (procmail, snmpwalk, things like that), and figuring out what the
right input and output for scripts like that would be.

	I plan on changing the format of my personal webpage a bit.  It
would be great to be able to point a script at everything in my
/public_html and have it do the formatting changes for me.

	Those are a few examples off the top of my head.

Cheers,
Raven
 
"Always there are two: a client and a server."
  -- Inanna, on Jedi computing