Advanced Bash Scripting

This Thursday, 4/23/09, Tom Henretty came to show us some more advanced bash techniques. Tom demonstrated some of the stuff that Jim Dinan didn’t have time to get to back when he did his awesome bash talk in December.

A tentative outline for this event was:

• Shell tools / techniques

• IO redirection / piping (with basic grep, awk, and sed)

• Flow control in bash - (if, for, tests)

• Using find to automate repetitive tasks

• Using cron to schedule tasks

• Gathering filesystem usage information

• Monitoring hard drive health with S.M.A.R.T. tools

• Tying it all together:

• Simple automated backups

• Incremental backups using rsync