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 those who wish to learn more of the general purpose Solaris/UNIX utilities, and be able to automate tasks by writing shell scripts. 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.

Our Solaris courses are suitable training for Solaris Certification. This course, combined with the Introduction to Solaris course (course code SI), provides preparation for the new Sun Certified Solaris Associate (SCSAS) CX-310-105 exam.

Each student will have exclusive use of a Sun workstation for the duration of the course. Each student will be provided with a full set of training notes relating to the course, and quick reference cards to assist with file editing and Unix commands

Each student leaves the course with their own set of training notes for the material covered; around 120 pages per day of training.

Covers Solaris running on both Sun and Intel hardware. Most, if not all, 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.

Course Objectives

To train those who know a little Unix more of the "nuts and bolts" of Solaris so that they will make good power users, and have the tools at their command to become excellent administrators and applications support technicians.

Prerequisites

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

Follow-ups

If you are responsible for looking after day-to-day administration, then we can offer a comprehensive range of Solaris 10 Administration courses up to Solaris Certified Systems Administrator levels, and then on to Solaris Certified Network Administrator.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Contents

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, compress, gzip, mt, od, what, strings, etc.)
• Utilities for hunting around (find, which)
• Using cmp, diff and 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 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

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