My Favorite One-Liners: Some Useful Shell Programs… But first things first… I would like to note that this aint my list of favorite shell programs.. well, it has become… but what I mean is this aint an original article that I created and posted here.. this is a section from the now defunt, Sysadmin Magazine… and you’ll be reading a lot of those here….

“Keep It Simple, SysAdmin,” or perhaps just “Keep It Shell Script”, that is one of the motto that every sysdamin knows… They automate, they script, they relax.

Too many system administrators, especially former or frustrated programmers, get involved and distracted creating ad hoc programs that grow until they have a life and a following of their own. These programs generally are written in C, awk, or C shell, have no documentation, and are incomprehensible, even to the author, less than two weeks after being finished.