Do you know what human beings are really good at? Offloading labour onto machines. I mean, we are a species that has tried and, at varying rates, succeeded in automating our survival. A few examples come to mind transportation, medicine, manufacturing, food processing, etc. Things that were once labour intensive were reduced from years to months, then weeks, days…..you get the idea. Some will argue that separating survival from work has made us less human and long for the nostalgia of the “challenge” of overcoming nature and has made us lazy.
I personally enjoy being lazy; it means that I can think of new ways to get things done faster and give me more time(read freedom). This relates to technology because mundane tasks can be automated. This is where shell scripting comes in to do just that, and I believe it’s a vital skill to anyone who’s lazy and wants to free themselves up and automate workflow. A script is a command-line interpreter program to execute a command in the simplest terms. For example, say I needed to work as a system administrator, and I get calls from human resources to add new employees to a database. Hence, they have access to company resources from their workspace. Instead of me manually entering a new employee every time a new hire comes on, I decided to write a script that makes a username, password, and permissions all at once.
Administrators can add new users to the system, and I don’t have to interrupt my admin tasks. Awesome right? Scripting also helps build upon programming principles such as variables, functions, and control flow.
Well back to learn more. Thanks for reading.