On the 29th September until 1st October I have finished my second course in Linux/Unix. This second course was related to shell scripting. Of course we handled the differences between the Korn shell (ksh), the C shell (csh), the Bourne shell (sh) and the Bourne Again shell (bash). I was very excited to take part of this course. I come from a Windows (sorry for shooting ;-)) platform, but I work with Linux some time now. But never had a really good basis regarding what everything means and why something works like that.

Before I take part of this second course I had also followed the course about Linux/Unix chapter I. In this first chapter we where introduced into Linux with a shell. The course was focused on people that have to work with a Linux/Unix environment that is already installed and maintained by other people. This course learned us how Linux/Unis works. For example:

• How Linux/Unix is born and the variations
• Basics about: how to login, keyboard conventions, shell conventions, how to read errors, how to use the manual
• Regular expressions (basic)
• How to use VI
• How to file system works (inodes, permissions etc)
• I/O redirection (STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR)
• Using pipes

Those where to main subjects in that course and I must say it was a great experience to do this first course. Although I thought I was ready to skip this course I was satisfied that I didn't. Why? Because the teachers are all real Linux/Unix users and developers from the beginning of this system. They give great courses and really get you going from zero to where ever you wanna stop. I can recommend everybody that wants to start with Linux/Unix this course.

Well now my basic knowledge about this system is correct, I followed also the second course of this training company. Like I said this was about shell scripting. Here a little background information about the handled chapters:

• Advanced I/O redirection
• Programming with the Korn, Bourne and bash shell
• Using the stream editor: SED
• The scripting language "awk"

Well you can guess know what I will be doing the next couple of weeks :-). Yeah that is right, I am going to practise my bash scripting using regular expressions, sed, awk and all other knowledge I gather these courses. Please feel free to check into my website on a regular basis to find some shell scripting I did.

Of course I won't be a hardcore scripter right away, but everybody has to start somewhere! Also in the next year I will be following some more courses, hopefully I will attend the following courses:

• Advanced shell scripting
• System management
• TCP/IP networking (Linux/Unix)
• Linux/Unix system and Internet security
• Linux performance analyse and tuning
• LDAP

Sadly I have to wait until next year, because the budget of the company is gone for this year, but hey it is a good perspective! When I finished these courses you will notice ;-). For know let me finish with a little bash script:

#!/bin/bash
echo "My first bash script!"