Increasing productivity

Wanna load a bunch of users/passwords to your system? Wanna auto-generate mailman lists? Wanna concentrate all your weekly backups on a single server directory? Wanna batch? Got it! But only on text-based systems (read x-based OSs). If you manage IT facilities, YOU WILL NEED:

* cron, at, batch

* man man

* perl, bash

And some specific tools examples:

* chpasswd, sed, awk, rsync, scp

* mailman: all in /bin dir. sync_members will save you days if you schedule it with your /etc/passwd or adduser changes!

* sendmail: m4, makemap

* apache: mod_auth_pam, if you wanna simplify managing and have a LDAPping-Krb alternative

* Windows admins: Have you tried bash tools on your cmd.exe line?

X-based servers are in a highly mature state. They had evolved to satisfy most common administrative requests. Just search.

A quote from "A quarter Century of Unix" by P Salus" states, quoted from Simone Demblon :)

* write programs that do one thing and do it well.
* write programs that work together
* write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface

Cheers!