Solaris Utilities and Shell Programming

Solaris Utilities and Shell Programming

This three-day course provides a follow-on from the Introduction to Solaris course for power users and administrators who wish to learn more of the general purpose Solaris/UNIX utilities, and be able to automate tasks by writing shell scripts using the Bourne, Korn and Bash shells. This course not only teaches you the utilities and programming skills, but also provides many examples of useful shell scripts. A further important aspect is that you will be able to readily interpret existing scripts. This course, combined with the Solaris Introduction course (course code SI), provides preparation for the new Sun Certified Solaris Associate (SCSAS) CX-310-105 exam.

Our Solaris courses are suitable training for Solaris Certification

TOPICS COVERED ON THE COURSE

Review of shell facilities
A recap of Redirection. piping. history. aliases. metacharacters. command line editing, shell variables, dot files, etc.

Regular Expressions
Commands that use regular expressions. Special characters in regular expressions. Examples of regular expressions using the grep utility.

Solaris utilities
Utilities for manipulating data, generating reports and much more (nawk, grep, egrep, sort, sed, cut, tr, plus overview of GNU utilities supplied with Solaris). Utilities for examining, converting, compressing and archiving data (dd, tar, mt, compress, gzip, od, what, strings, etc.). Utilities for hunting around (find, which). Comparison/Differential commands. Using cmp, diff, comm for comparing files and directories.

Advanced vi
Using the more complex and powerful facilities of the vi editor. Moving blocks of text. Recovering previous deleted lines. Placing markers in text. Running UNIX commands from vi. Setting and saving options. Using ex commands for rapid repetitive changes.

Bourne, Korn and Bash Shell Programming
The Bourne shell: A simple shell program.
Execution of and distribution of scripts. Debugging facilities.
Run time arguments. Obtaining input from the keyboard.
User-defined and built-in Shell variables. Integer Arithmetic.
Control statements: Using if to compare integers and strings. Using if to check for files, directories and permissions.
Loop statements: for, while and until.
The case statement.
Creating and using functions within a script.
Catching interrupts with trap.
The Korn and Bash Shells: The additional programming features of the korn and bash shells such as let and select, plus built-in integer arithmetic and other facilities.
Practicals include interpretation of existing scripts as well as writing new scripts.
Reference material: Techniques and practical tips for good scripts: Use of absolute & relative paths - passing data between commands - useful special files and directories - labelling your output - options - good programming practice.

Overview of System Administration
(Food for thought before attending the Systems Admin classes) Solaris configurations & hardware types. Pointers to performing administration tasks on Solaris, including:- System administration functions & procedures. How is administration carried out? System Administration tools.