The language of the UNIX command line is notoriously versatile: with a panorama of small tools and utilities and a shell to combine and execute them, you can specify many precise and complex tasks. Learn how to use techniques unique to UNIX in an office setting, which become a powerful ally toward increasing your productivity.
This article has some useful bits (using history to find common tasks, mentioning leave(1), expect(1), and others) but they’re not really shown in a useful manner. If you didn’t already know what you were doing and how to use these bits of information, you’d be lost still.
It’s a nice review of things which may have sunk back into the dark corners of one’s mind but feels incomplete with out a mention of scripting more than just some program interactions.
For example, I teach at a school. I need to create specific records and logs of events as they happen. Once I looked at the manner I was using to do that, I was able to create a script which automated all of it. Now I just type studentname.jrn (all of which are linked to the master script) and type what I need to. Everything else is automated.
And what about the calendar(1) program? This is absolutely essential for keeping up to date in an office environment (birthdays, meetings, etc.). You can add an event to a simple file and then set the program to run at login to let you know what you have coming up. Or, if you can, create a cronjob which emails you each morning before you come in with the results of calendar to remind you of things coming up. I have it email me three times a week with any events coming up in the next 10 days and a calendar so I know where they fall (it sends nothing if nothing is coming up). Careful use of this program and you’ll never miss an important meeting or date again.
If you want to make a difference with scripting you need in my humble opinion to know about basic commands,options and how to chain them.The article addresses just to that and does that very good and easy to follow.Once the basics are grasped you will see real scripting is a piece of cake.
You know, that could be part of the problem I see with it. Some parts are really basic and others make a leap beyond what I would expect is within the abilities of the people reading it. For example, it barely even mentions shell scripting (nor provides a link to resources for that) but assumes the reader knows how to edit their shell startup scripts.
Every little bit of information helps people. So this article is certainly beneficial. It just seems to be talking from two different directions without meeting in the middle. The only improvements I would even make would be to mention that you can script common commands and actions and give a link to a place to learn more specifically about scripting. It mentions it once in passing but doesn’t provide an example or a link to more resourced. Simply showing a sample script (maybe from the wpm example) to demonstrate the simplicity would have cleared up that one issue I had with it.
Edited 2006-09-22 01:22