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What programming things should every SysAdmin know?

This is a mirror image of this question here: https://serverfault.com/questions/4176/what-sysadmin-things-should-every-programmer-know

The original was sent by Nathan DeWitt . The loan should go to him. If you have a serverfault account, please visit its original question and click on it to express appreciation for this request.

To paraphrase Nathan:

Like SysAdmin, we tend to take programmers for granted. Several times, when I was without a good programmer, I really appreciated what you guys are doing. When we set off on Wednesday without a programmer, what words of wisdom can you offer us?

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4 answers

Sysadmins need to know what improves their effectiveness.

This includes all the features of the shell in which they work ( bash quite popular these days). There are many very useful things in the manual (from keyboard shortcuts from arrays to regular expressions).

It is very sad to see that the younger sysadmin is trying to manually enter 200 servers and switch the line in some file in / etc

If I were an administrator recruit, I would require advanced (but not expert) knowledge of the programming language. It doesn’t matter what language it is, since it can easily switch to something else, but if it has never encoded anything , it will not know how much (precious) time it spends manually, doing things that can be done with a few lines of code.

Admins are usually similar to bash, php, python, awk and perl. Any of them will at least triple their performance in repetitive tasks.

On the other hand, encoders must know the configuration of httpd and loadbalancer or they will reinvent the wheel.

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Programmers need access to online resources (for example, StackOverflow). Do not block our kthnx access.

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I would say that the system administrator is a kind of programmer. Therefore, they must be able to think about programming; use scripting languages ​​effectively and write clear, well-documented programs in them; have some idea of ​​how a programming project works.

Ideally, they should read flexible methods, because the rapid development of small, plug-in programs is the ordinary world in which they live. They need to understand testing, and if they use a modern scripting language, they need to understand unit testing tools, some version of xUnit.

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Perl

Sure.

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