[kwlug-disc] Scripting in Linux and unit.d

[Bob Jonkman]

Charles McColm and I were recently bitten by the 
"We-want-to-be-Python-programmers" bug. On Friday at Ubuntu Hour we met 
a fellow from London (ON).  Sadly, my memory has lost its parity bits 
and I don't recall his name. Maybe "Mars" on the Ubuntu IRC channel? 
Anyway, he's a professional Python programmer, and he said he might be 
willing to come back to guide some of us newbies towards a life of 
Pythony goodness.  He suggested we start with Mark Pilgrim's "Dive Into 
Python" or Zed A. Shaw's "Learn Python The Hard Way".

Is there interest in learning Python within the ranks of KWLUG?  All we 
need is a project to work on... The KWPUG  group seems to be defunct, 
but we can strike out on our own.

--Bob.

Dive Into Python http://www.diveintopython.net/
Learn Python The Hard Way http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
KWPUG http://kwpug.org
Ubuntu Canada IRC channel irc://irc.freenode.net/#ubuntu-ca or 
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=ubuntu-ca



John Van Ostrand <john at netdirect.ca> wrote:

    Hi Colon,

    Scripting in Linux relies heavily on the vast array of programs
    either directly or indirectly.

    Bash is the command shell and is commonly used for scripting,
    especially in system start up. It uses external programs heavily. I
    usually start with bash and if it proves poor for the task I move to
    perl by massaging the script.

    Perl is a very flexible and powerful scripting language and it
    borrows a lot of syntax from bash, awk and grep. So learning bash
    helps with perl. It works well for parsing text files.

    Python seems to be one of the more recently popular scripting. With
    add-ons it's used for Fedora admin Gui programs. It also handles
    threading well and has lots of other add-on modules.

    There are lots of other options but these are the common workhorse
    apps for system-level scripting.
    Bash and the common linux commands are worth getting familiar with.
    Regular expressions are also commonly handy. These are the basics
    that I findf handy all the time.

    What are you trying to do?

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    *From*: kwlug-disc-bounces at kwlug.org
    *To*: KWLug Discussion
    *Sent*: Sat Jan 07 18:48:02 2012
    *Subject*: [kwlug-disc] Scripting in Linux and unit.d

    I'm not a programmer but I do understand some fundamentals and
    looking to learn some scripting so that I can automate some tasks.
    What would be a good way to learn this stuff.