"Strong Scripting Skills" - a definition?

Mon Jan 26 18:07:15 PST 2004

jimd at starshine.org writes:
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 09:14:09PM -0800, richard childers / kg6hac wrote:
> 
> 
> >> how will I know
> >> when I can say with confidence that I have "strong" scripting skills?
> 
>  The phrase is clearly ambiguous and subjective.  I've taught classes in
>  shell scripting.
>  
>  I once had an interviewer put up a wretched fragment of shell code like:
> 
>  	kill `ps wax | grep "foo" | grep -v "grep" | awk '{print $11}'`
> 

Hey!  Somebody's stealing my question!   

Actually, the use of grep in this pipeline is quite valid.  I have had
people tell me the -v optiion was for verbose (I shit you not. And these
were people representing themselves as senior sysadmins).  I also use the
question to see if people know why "grep foo" shows up in the output of ps
(many don't).  You also left off the last pipe which I believe is |xargs rm.
Again, a lot of people are unfamiliar with xargs.

You can get 6 good questions out of this.  Granted, if I had interviewed you
and you replied with your alternative, I would have been quite impressed.

This quesion was derived in 1989 or 1990, I forget which.  Most systems
support killall these days. :)

- Paul -