"Strong Scripting Skills" - a definition? - sunday fun

Mon Jan 26 10:53:01 PST 2004

hi ya

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Roy S. Rapoport wrote:

> Given a complex task in the command-line environment, do you know how you'd
> automate it?

"how to automate" is not necessarily good or bad ...

how would you "test it" ( error conditions, boundry cases, etc ) 
( what will make it break ) is my criteria for "strong skills"
	everybody's different on what they want...
	others might want well documented and properly commented code :-0

> I'm not looking for an explanation of the difference between "ef" and
> "waxu" for ps.  If you can say that your 'kill-by-name' command would have
> a ps <that lists all processes> | grep <bonus points for using a regexp to
> avoid partial matching> | awk | kill then you've got almost-strong-enough
> skills, though that's an often-enough used example (and problem) that most
> people have thought about it before.  

the above would fail if they didnt test for multiple instances of
the app they're killing ( say a specific hung sshd  )

> I find that people with strong scripting skills (my definition of the
> world) are the sort of people who aren't going to be going "holy cow, how
> do I get *that* done?," 

holy cow types are okay ... shows honesty ..
and hopefully they have a holy cow for us/hiring managers too

> Oh, and portability is for, umm, heterogeneous systems.  It's not required
> (and if you're not designing for a heterogeneous system, I tend to think it
> can be a bad thing).

hey danny,i think different systems ( hpux, sgi, slow-r-us, *nix, linux )
sometimes uses different flags for uname too "uname -s" is  what i start
from ( and more testing ... )

hey jim ... any more trick interview/class questions ?? hehehee :-)

c ya
alvin