Understand the computer through Bash

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing various bash scripts to automate the various tasks I have to perform to maintain a Planetlab slice and run tests for my experiments on Amazon EC2. As a novice in bash scripting, I have spent a good chunk of time reading the bash manual (easily available through 'man bash'). Through reading the manual, I began to understand how powerful the shell really is. As a child of the graphical UI era, where everything is done through mouse clicks, noone took the time to tell me how much more effective one can be by simply interacting with the shell. The shell gives you so much more control and understanding for process management, file access, and networking. Overall, the shell has helped me gain a much greater appreciation for the operating system and for the many tool available for decades such as grep, awk, sed, find, join, cat, lpr, screen, vim, cut, just to name a few. The sad part is that it took me this long to realize this, but as they say, it's better late than never.

TTYL, Internetland