Solaris Utilities and Shell Programming — A 3-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Synopsis

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 covers Solaris running on both Sun and Intel hardware. More than 90% of the material is also applicable to other versions of Unix and our tutors will be able to advise which features are Solaris-specific as they present the course.

Prerequisites

Experience of Solaris, Linux or UNIX similar to the level covered in our Introduction to Solaris course.

Follow-up

We offer a comprehensive range of Solaris 10 Systems Administration courses right up to Advanced levels. (see Solaris Systems Administration Part 1 for the first of these). Those who need to tackle more advanced data manipulation and scripting techniques should also consider our range of Perl Programming courses. This course is part of a program which can lead you to Solaris Certification

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Contents

Review of shell facilities

• Redirection
• Piping
• History
• Aliases
• Metacharacters
• Command line editing
• Shell variables

Regular Expression

• Commands that use regular expressions
• Special characters in regular expressions
• Examples of regular expressions used with 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 and archiving data (dd, tar, mt, od, what, strings).
• Utilities for hunting around (find, which).
• Comparison/Differential commands.
• Using cmp, diff, diff3, comm for comparing files and directories.

Advanced vi

• Using the more complex and powerful facilities of the vi editor.
• Moving blocks of text
• Recovering previously deleted lines.
• Placing position markers in text
• Running UNIX commands from vi
• Setting and saving options
• Using ex (last-line) commands for rapid repetitive changes
• Setting up keyboard macros

Bourne, Korn and Bash Shell Programming

• The Bourne shell: A simple shell program
• Execution of and distribution of scripts
• Run time arguments
• Obtaining input from the keyboard
• Shell variables
• Integer Arithmetic
• Control statements: if
• Loop statements: for, while and until
• The case statement
• Catching interrupts with trap
• The Korn Shell: The additional programming features of the korn shell such as let and select, plus integer arithmetic and other facilities
• Practicals include interpretation of existing scripts as well as writing new scripts
• 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

The Printer Spooling mechanism

• Understanding the printer spooling mechanism
• Using the spooling commands
• Troubleshooting hung printers

Brief Overview of System Administration

• Sun Workstation Solaris configurations & hardware types
• Pointers to performing administration tasks on Solaris, including:- System administration functions & procedures
• How is administration carried out? System Administration tools

Network Resources

• Network File System (NFS) Overview - uses & benefits
• NFS example
• Overview of the network information services NIS, NIS+ and DNS
• Other major network facilities, e.g. web servers and browsers.