Welcome to the

Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts

Promoting Linux and Open Source Software Freedom in Atlanta Since 1994
Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts (ALE) is a diverse group of friendly people who enjoy the freedoms and benefits of GNU Linux Computing and Free Liberating Open Source Software technologies. From novices to network administrators, from smart phones to data centers, we strive to empower every information technology user with freely distributable software and to improve every computing environment with the superior security, functionality and flexibility of Open Source Operating System solutions. -- more about ALE --
For information about upcoming weekly and monthly meetings, please check the ALE Meetup Group Calendar. We do not, and never will, require anyone to sign up with Meetup (or any other service) to attend any of our meetings; we only use it as an additional platform to connect with others in the local Atlanta area who are also interested in Linux.

ALE CENTRAL MTG. for Thurs., May 20th, 2010

Filed at 5:02 pm May 7, 2010 under by Ruscetta


The feature presentation for the ALE Central Meeting
on Thursday, May 20th, at 7:30pm will be:

“Seat Belts and Air Bags for Bash”
presented by Michael Potter of
Replatform Technologies, LLC

Synopsis:
— This presentation will focus on the underutilized features of bash
that are critical to building production quality scripts. Demos will
show you how to turn on options and error trapping that expose
the hidden time bombs in the code.

Turning these features on should be considered a requirement,
much like turning on “strict” and “warnings” is considered a
requirement for Perl programs.

Also, as much of the bash syntax has become outdated, the
presentation will explain which syntax is best to use and which
syntax to avoid.

Knowledge of any of the common UNIX scripting languages
will be sufficient to understand the presentation and script
authors at all proficiency levels should find value in attending.
Although the presentation does not address differences between
Korn shell and bash, much of what will be discussed also
applies to Korn shell.

Bio:
— Michael Potter has been working in IT since 1989, when he
switched from programming automotive embedded systems.

Since that time he has been involved in projects related
to moving mainframe applications to UNIX and Linux using
open-source technologies. Projects have included
* a CICS emulator written in C,
* a source code control and configuration system,
* a DFSORT like set of utilities that work similar
to sed/grep/sort tools on unix,
* a JCL to bash conversion scheme, and
* a scheme to add web service interface to
mainframe applications.

Michael recently released his mainframe socket emulation
code as open source. This code will allow socket code
originally written on the mainframe to be recompiled
and run on Linux.

Michael recently moved his mainframe rehosting business,
Replatform Technologies, LLC, from Chicago to Atlanta.
And just for fun you can check out his Atlanta Startup Weekend
project here: www.instantloop.com

You can reach Michael at michael@potter.name

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We will be meeting at our usual venue, Emory Law School,
Gambrel Hall, rm 1C. Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at
[http://ale.org/?page_id=2].