I already posted something like this to the Novell chat forum so my apologies to anyone who has to read it twice…
I’ve taken up the task of getting better at shell scripting, I’m new at this so forgive me if I’m mixing technologies, but looking at BASH, PERL, PYTHON (perhaps KORN?).
I’ve found the writing shell scripts tips at LinuxCommand.org: Learn the Linux command line. Write shell scripts. as well as the “Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide” at tldp.org/LDP/abs/abs-guide.pdf which I’ll go through, but then I’d like a place to practice and our Linux work setup doesn’t provide a LOT of opportunities. So I was thinking is if there’s a group (LinkedIn or other) that I can join where people are asked by fellow members to write scripts, that I could volunteer there, get my practice and help some people out at the same time, …
I’m practicing in an openSUSE VM at home and we use SLES/OES2 at the office.
I was referred to this openSUSE forum by somebody at the chat forum as a possibility, but any other thoughts or ideas that would help are appreciated!
There are people who are great with some programming languages in this forum, as I got helped much by them. I think if you post your questions here regarding bash and usage of gnu programs (sed, awk, gret etc.) or any other programming language of your choice, chances of your questions going unanswered are pretty slim. And rest, depends on how much reading and practicing you do.
You are on the right track here. You need to write scripts and solve problems one by one as they arise. Pick a project. Something where you want to bite the bullet, because it is interesting for you. Example: a shell script which displays a menu, where you can select different system parameters (cpu load, fan speed, hard disk usage …) to be displayed. This could make you to explore the whole system and such a script will not be finished soon, but could return first results after a couple of lines have been written - you pick your own.
Thanks for the responses, yes definitely doing something of use and interest to me is going to make me retain more than just following exercises and typing them out and saying “wow - look at the result…”.
Is there any forum or similar Internet group where users post requests for scripts that maybe I can help out at to be more active in it?
You could also try linuxquestions.org, a local Linux Users Group as well as this sub-forum.
You could write some scripts for your self starting with alias commands, a function to a batch program.
Like a bash script to keep a list of your uniq bash command history, excluding the too simple commands like "ls ".
If you make a killer one-liner you could post it to All commands | commandlinefu.com
a great website for helpful and fun one-line Bash commands (guests can compare and grade your code as well).