12 Apr 2000 Centove   » (Journeyer)

Today was argue with phone company about bill. *sigh* Thats one thing I hate about moving is it takes forever to get all the services settled down in the new place. First it was the cable company being impossible. Now MCI and AT&T can't decide on how much to bill us for long distance, never mind the fact that MCI shouldn't be billing me in the first place.

Also had one of those do some boring task but realize it would be virtually impossible without the unix shell environment days. Yes the unix shell is just amazing in what one can do with it and the various, crypticaly named utils. Add into the mix the piping and redirecting and some fairly amazing things can be done. Or some really trivial, but repeatitive tasks can be accomplished.

Here are some of the tasks I've had to do recently, imagine trying to do them without the basic unix factilties in a shell.

  • Combine two nameserver zone files into one and copy the resulting directory structure to the server. Oh and all the zone files are named db.<domain>.<com|net|org> on the server that they should wind up. Also the zone files are stored in a directory of the first letter of the actual domain. On the source server they are all just lumped together in one dir. (about 250 files) This took me about 10 mins to do. Try and think how long it would have taken moving em around by hand.

  • Now that all zone files are on one machine. Add the missing ones to the sql database that the named.boot/conf is built from.

  • Update the installed XFree packages on a group of machines, where each machine has a different Xserver..

  • (this one comes up almost daily) Convert a MS-DOS text file to something a unix machine will be happy with (usually a perl script)
    Anyway thats just some random sysadmin type junk that is made easier with the unix utils :)
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