Administrative Automation

Administrative Automation

Copyright(c) Management Analytics, 1995 - All Rights Reserved

Copyright(c), 1990, 1995 Dr. Frederick B. Cohen - All Rights Reserved

One of the saving graces of UNIX administration is the ease of automating tasks with Sh and Csh command scripts. As you perform more and more administrative tasks, you become better and better at figuring out how to make them essentially automatic. Sh provides a convenient way of automating commands, but more than that, it is a general purpose interpretive language.

Another UNIX facility that helps in administration is its `program' maintenance facility called `Make'. Make is a program that allows the programmer to describe the relationship of files to each other, and provides automation for reflecting source changes in destination files. Many users use `make' to rebuild executable programs and libraries to reflect changes in a source program, but the facility is general enough to automate many other aspects of systems administration.

Between these facilities, it is pretty easy to automate the vast majority of administrative tasks, and in fact, that is one of the major tasks of a good UNIX systems administrator.