[ale] Linux shell process

[Lightner, Jeff]

Maybe they were looking for some automated MOTD population that you'd see at login?  If they hadn't told you to assume cron I'd think they might want you to create at jobs.

Questions like that aggravate me.  I once had an interview where they asked "What is the one thing that makes RedHat Linux different from all other distros?"   I mentioned it being commercial, it using RedHat customized versions of static upstream package releases and many other things but never did give them the "one thing" they were wanted to hear.   Now with several years more RHEL experience under my belt I can still not think of "one thing" (other than it is released by RedHat of course).   At least when I interview someone and ask a question and can see they're not headed in the right direction I try to prompt with more information.





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim Butler
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2012 3:38 PM
To: Enthusiests Group, Atlanta
Subject: [ale] Linux shell process

Hi everyone.
I need someone to help shed some light on a question I have.
This morning I had a job interview for a Linux admin position, and I
thought I'd done a pretty good job of preparing myself for the drill of
questions, and I thought my experience would be strong enough in the
areas of Linux that I am familiar with but apparently not. Here is the
question they put to me, and I would like to hear a variety of answers:

Suppose you have a list of 10 birthdays for 10 different friends, and
you wanted to create a task from within a bash shell environment that
would alert you as to when each friend's birthday came around. How would
you do it?

The first part of the question is obvious. Since it's a time/date
related question, I automatically assumed cron would be part of the
solution. That wasn't the part of the solution they were looking for. In
proceeding with the question they told me to forget cron because we
already know that cron is a part of the process. I mentioned about
running the date command and piping output through some kind of if/then
structure in a script that would match the date against a user's
birthday and if it matched, then to print out a message saying that it's
that person's birthday. That wasn't exactly what they were looking for
either. I suppose there must be a shell command somewhere for setting up
alarms like an alarm clock, but I don't know if that is what they were
looking for either.

In any case, it's probably an obvious question to someone, and it's a
little embarrassing that I missed it, but I always like to learn from my
experiences. Please think about the question and let me know how you
would solve this.

-Jim Butler


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