[PLUG-ANNOUNCE] Thursday PLUG Meeting: This is a test(1): A shell scripter's guide to ubiquitous assumption testing

[Michael Dexter]

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Michael Dexter
What: This is a test(1): A shell scripter's guide to ubiquitous 
assumption testing
Where: Zoom, flawed as it is, link below
When: Thursday, February 3rd, 2022 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

"Look before you leap" is a valuable lesson in many aspects of life but 
particularly in computer science and administration. Responsible 
developers make extensive use of the test(1), a.k.a. "[" utility which 
quickly and programmatically tests assumptions as simple as, "does this 
file exist", relying on zero and non-zero return values to answer that 
question. This deceptively-simple yet highly-efficient use of return 
values can avoid hours of debugging and achieve goals such as 
idempotence. This talk will explain the importance of the test(1) 
utility, and explain similar functionality in other utilities such as 
FreeBSD's grep(1), kldstat(8), and others that support "-q quiet" mode. 
It will also identify opportunities for additional "quiet mode" 
functionality.

About Michael

He broke it, he bought it. Michael has organized PLUG since late 2009 
and did not find a speaker. By day, Michael has nursed depressed NAS 
systems back to life since 2012.


https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85249530401?pwd=dWZPTllGRk1udWtVRXB0STZ2VlJXZz09

Meeting ID: 852 4953 0401
Passcode: 8675309
One tap mobile
+13462487799,,85249530401# US (Houston)
+17207072699,,85249530401# US (Denver)


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Michael Dexter
PLUG Volunteer