Here’s the story – I’m a “Systems Administrator” for a mostly Microsoft network, however because of management we have an Oracle implementation that is running on RHEL4. I am making the case to migrate it to AIX, and with the datacenter constraints it really shouldn’t be difficult. Because of my current server operating systems I’ve mostly been working in the windows scripting environment (VBScript, WMI, Powershell) to get what I need done. Now it seems I’m moving to the *NIX environment, managing a lot more DR and storage. All of this is a really good thing!!! However it’s been a really long time since I’ve written any Perl and they were pretty simple at that. Does anyone have any idea what would be the fastest way to get up to speed here? I’m currently reading a ridiculous amount of documentation and guess I’m just going to need to add a programming language to that.
The biggest difference between AIX and Linux that I find annoying is the default shell – I’m accustomed to bash not ksh and it’s taking a little getting used to. I did install bash but am trying to get used to ksh so I only run bash when I really need to…
Between AIX, TSM, and Oracle I’m having more fun at work than I have in years.
I would suggest a light skimming of my “Learning Perl” book, digging in deeper if things start becoming unfamiliar. You should be able to read the entire thing in about 4 to 8 hours, or about 20 hours if you do all the exercises.
If you have specific tasks, you might want to take a look at the Perl Cookbook, by O’Reilly. It’s very good for the common scenario where you say to yourself, “I need to do X, how do I do that?” Also, you’re more than welcome to email me questions.
As for ksh, why not make bash your default?
I’ve thought about making bash the default and it would be really easy, however I’m of the opinion that I want to become familiar with the system as it’s meant to be. A lot of the scripts that I find for AIX are written in Korn so why not at least try and become familiar with it and learn something new.
Honestly the thing I miss the most about bash are the tab completions and command history.
Have a look at
http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/shell/ksh_hist.html
and http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/shell/cmd1.3.html