UNIX Utilities and Shell Programming

This three-day course provides a follow-on from the Introduction to UNIX course for power users and administrators who wish to learn more of the general purpose UNIX utilities, and be able to automate tasks by writing shell scripts using the Bourne, Korn and Bash shells. This course not only teaches you the utilities and programming skills, but also provides many examples of useful shell scripts. A further important aspect is that you will be able to readily interpret existing scripts.

OBJECTIVES OF THE COURSE

To train those who know a little Unix more of the "nuts and bolts" of UNIX so that they will make good power users, and have the tools at their command to become excellent administrators and applications support technicians.

COURSE DATES:

INTENSITY: About 30% of the course is practicals, and 60% lectures.

RESOURCE: Each student will have exclusive use of a workstation for the duration of the course. Each student will be provided with a full set of training notes relating to the course, and quick reference cards to assist with file editing and Unix commands

Printer(s) are provided on this course so that students can learn how to use them, and also take away printed copies of their work.

Tape drives are provided for each student for use during archiving exercises.

PREREQUISITES: Experience of UNIX similar to the level covered in our Introduction to UNIX course.

FOLLOW UPS: We offer a comprehensive range of Solaris 10 Systems Administration courses right up to Advanced levels. (see Solaris 10 System Administration (Part 1) for the first of these). For those involved in administrating networks, our Solaris 10 Network Administration course would be ideal, and leads to the Solaris Certified Network Administrator CX-310-302 exam.

Those who need to tackle more advanced data manipulation and scripting techniques should also consider our range of Perl Programming courses. Sheets describing each of our courses, and current schedules, are available on request.

PRACTICALS / TAKEAWAYS: Each student leaves the course with their own set of training notes for the material covered; around 120 pages per day of training.

SOFTWARE VERSIONS: Suitable for any version of UNIX or Linux

COURSE PROFILES: During the course, the student will learn from many practical examples written for this course and supplied in the manual. For ease of use during and after the course, we have provided these examples online.

TOPICS COVERED ON THE COURSE

Review of shell facilities

• Redirection and Piping of output and errors.
• Command History and command line editing.
  
• Aliases.
  
• Metacharacters (wild cards).
  
• Shell Variables and user profile configuration.

Regular Expressions

• What are regular expressions?
  
• Commands that use regular expressions.
  
• Special characters in regular expressions.
  
• Examples of regular expressions used with the grep utility.

Linux utilities

• Utilities for manipulating data, generating reports and much more (gawk, grep, sort, sed, cut, tr).
• Utilities for examining and converting data (dd, tar, mt, od, what, strings).
• Utilities for hunting around (find, which). 
• Using cmp, diff and comm for comparing files and directories.
• Compression utilities compress, zip, gzip, bzip2, etc.

Advanced vi

• Review of basic vi use.
• Using the more complex and powerful facilities of the vi editor.
• Moving blocks of text.
• Recovering previous deleted lines.
• Placing markers in text.
• Running Linux commands from vi.
• Setting and saving options.
• Using ex commands for rapid repetitive changes.

Bourne, Korn and Bash Shell Programming

• A simple shell program.
• Execution of Scripts.
• Script debugging.
• Run time arguments.
• Input from the keyboard.
• Shell variables and special variables.
• Arithmetic facilities.
• Control and Loop statements (if, for, while until, case, select).
• Functions in scripts.
• Catching interrupts with trap.
• Script organisation.
• (Practicals include interpretation of existing scripts as well as writing new scripts).

Techniques and practical tips for good scripts.

• Use of absolute & relative paths.
• Passing data between commands.
• Useful special files and directories.
• Labelling your output.
• General best programming practices.

Overview of System Administration

• Pointers to performing administration tasks on Linux, including:- Linux configurations & hardware support.
• System administration functions & procedures.
• How is administration carried out?
• System Administration tools.

SPECIAL SAVINGS FOR MULTIPLE AND PACKAGE BOOKINGS

Multiple Bookings
If you book more than one place on our courses on the same order, you are entitled to a 10% discount.