Some type of while loop with the date command maybe?<br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Jim Butler <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jimbutler1234567890@gmail.com">jimbutler1234567890@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi everyone.<br>
I need someone to help shed some light on a question I have.<br>
This morning I had a job interview for a Linux admin position, and I<br>
thought I'd done a pretty good job of preparing myself for the drill of<br>
questions, and I thought my experience would be strong enough in the<br>
areas of Linux that I am familiar with but apparently not. Here is the<br>
question they put to me, and I would like to hear a variety of answers:<br>
<br>
Suppose you have a list of 10 birthdays for 10 different friends, and<br>
you wanted to create a task from within a bash shell environment that<br>
would alert you as to when each friend's birthday came around. How would<br>
you do it?<br>
<br>
The first part of the question is obvious. Since it's a time/date<br>
related question, I automatically assumed cron would be part of the<br>
solution. That wasn't the part of the solution they were looking for. In<br>
proceeding with the question they told me to forget cron because we<br>
already know that cron is a part of the process. I mentioned about<br>
running the date command and piping output through some kind of if/then<br>
structure in a script that would match the date against a user's<br>
birthday and if it matched, then to print out a message saying that it's<br>
that person's birthday. That wasn't exactly what they were looking for<br>
either. I suppose there must be a shell command somewhere for setting up<br>
alarms like an alarm clock, but I don't know if that is what they were<br>
looking for either.<br>
<br>
In any case, it's probably an obvious question to someone, and it's a<br>
little embarrassing that I missed it, but I always like to learn from my<br>
experiences. Please think about the question and let me know how you<br>
would solve this.<br>
<br>
-Jim Butler<br>
<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div><br>