On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> > From: Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> > Subject: Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, > post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system > > On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Les Mikesell wrote: > >> On 9/17/2010 8:24 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: >>> >>>> Proper scripting abilities are perhaps beyond reach for a short >>>> course, but you could at least show off some one-liners or those >>>> short, stunningly useful examples to help them get the idea that >>>> they definitely should get their feet wet on it sooner or later. >>> >>> awk, awk! Perl's a day, minimum, by itself, but awk you can do in >>> an hour or two, and have immediate results. >> >> But awk is a dead end that can't do a lot of things by itself. And >> learning how to embed awk into other scripts is even more >> syntactically obscure than just using perl in the first place. >> Besides, perl's '-c' check and debug facilities make it much more >> usable to beginners than awk's propensity to find errors mid-run >> (and worse, mid-some-other-script because you had to embed it). > > i will probably throw in an hour or so of shell scripting, just > enough to whet their appetites and make them want an actual course. > :-) > > rday What about something on using the find command and xargs? Most shell commands can be piggy-backed on the find command. And also as mentioned, how and where to find documentation? pinfo is a nice man page and info page viewer, with Lynx like navigation. Much easier than trying to how to use the info command. # pinfo find 1 Introduction ************** This manual shows how to find files that meet criteria you specify, and how to perform various actions on the files that you find. The principal programs that you use to perform these tasks are `find', `locate', and `xargs'. Some of the examples in this manual use capabilities specific to the GNU versions of those programs. HTH Keith Roberts ----------------------------------------------------------------- Websites: http://www.karsites.net http://www.php-debuggers.net http://www.raised-from-the-dead.org.uk All email addresses are challenge-response protected with TMDA [http://tmda.net] -----------------------------------------------------------------