On 19/10/2017 23:30, Mark Clarke wrote:
> On 19/10/2017 22:12, Ingo Wichmann wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Am 19.10.2017 um 14:35 schrieb [email protected]:
>>> And please, add a bit of AWK, people gets stunned with quite simple awk
>>> tricks.
>> Oh, the awk discussion again. I don't think awk's relevance rose since
>> we discussed it last time.
>>
>> Awk is a processing language. Simply asking for the top 10 awk onliners
>> is not an option. To give it the respect it deserves, we'd have to cover
>> it's syntax, data-types and functions. For how much weight?
> I 2nd covering awk. We cover sed which is also a lot more complex than
> the one liner included in the objectives. For me the purpose is not to
> turn the candidate into an awk expert but to make them aware of awk and
> its usefulness. Much more relevant and useful than some of the other
> commands we cover.
>
>> Awk has its use cases, but all of these use cases can be solved with
>> other tools as well. Many of them with text-utils and bash. Others with
>> perl, python, ruby or other languages.
In an exam, you can only really ask about what the minimally qualified
individual really uses a tool for. Not what can be done with it, or what
it could be used for, but what is it really used for:
sed - s/srchstr/repl/g
awk - | awk '{print $somenumber}'
and also for awk that amazing syntax to print the last field on the
line, which I can never remember and spend 30 minutes on Google every
time I need it :-)
The problem with grep, sed, awk and a whole raft of other amazing tools
is that you strictly don't need them. You can always edit an entire file
by hand or eyeball it in less to find what you want. There are always
100s of ways to skin that cat and not everyone is wired to use everyone
else's amazing toolset.
OTOH, sshd is the only thing that is ever really going to do what sshd
does and it only really does each thing one way. So the candidate had
damn well better know how to make sshd sing and dance.
I know many fine sysadmins who have never touched awk and never intend
to. But all of them know sshd backwards.
We only have so many weight dollar to spend. What are we going to spend
them on? Maybe awk is just something that can be dropped entirely and
make not one iota of difference to what we are really measuring here -
does the candidate deserve to get his LPI sheepskin (and by inference
can let him log into your prod server and cab reasonably confident they
won't be wreaked?)
--
Alan McKinnon
[email protected]
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