Re: *BSD

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 10:52:33PM -0600, Jonathan wrote:
>   c) You do this for the same reason old time scholars studied Latin.
>      It's true that Latin is not used any more but many romance 
>      languages use Latin cognates or derivatives. Knowing Latin (*BSD)
>      helps you to understand the modern languages (Fedora, Debian) 
>      better.

Jonathan makes a very good point here.  I'm convinced that my time
working on HP-UX, Solaris, SCO OpenServer (ick), etc. (and my time
playing with V7, Minix, QNX, etc.) has made me a better sysadmin.

For example, I learned Perl before I ever had a chance (or reason) to
learn sed and awk.  When I started working on HP-UX, I couldn't rely
on having Perl installed, much less a recent Perl5 like I was used to,
so I had to learn to do a lot of simple things with standard tools
like sed and awk.  (In many cases, it's actually easier to do little
things with those older tools than it is with Perl.  There's a reason
why Perl is called a "Swiss Army Chainsaw".  :-)

In addition, forcing myself to work with sed more made me start
thinking in terms of "real" regular expressions instead of Perl's
enhanced-regular-expressions-on-steroids.  That has also helped me
work more efficiently in vi and random other things (like grep).

Plus, every time I sit down at another weird Unix, it is that much
easier for me to figure out what I'm doing.  For example, when I
started as an HP-UX admin, I'd never actually seen HP-UX, but I was
getting real work done on my first day.  Everyone seemed to be a bit
shocked, but that's the beautiful thing about Unix.  For the most
part, Unix is Unix (even if it is Linux or whatever :), and when it
isn't, pretty much every Unix is different in the same ways.  Once you
learn a couple of them, it's pretty hard to be surprised.

And when all else fails, GNU tools are the great equalizer.

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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