[ale] Linux shell process

[Stephen Leonard]

Maybe they're looking for at(1).  I also like remind(1).

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 03:37:55PM -0400, Jim Butler wrote:
> Hi everyone.
> I need someone to help shed some light on a question I have.
> This morning I had a job interview for a Linux admin position, and I 
> thought I'd done a pretty good job of preparing myself for the drill of 
> questions, and I thought my experience would be strong enough in the 
> areas of Linux that I am familiar with but apparently not. Here is the 
> question they put to me, and I would like to hear a variety of answers:
> 
> Suppose you have a list of 10 birthdays for 10 different friends, and 
> you wanted to create a task from within a bash shell environment that 
> would alert you as to when each friend's birthday came around. How would 
> you do it?
> 
> The first part of the question is obvious. Since it's a time/date 
> related question, I automatically assumed cron would be part of the 
> solution. That wasn't the part of the solution they were looking for. In 
> proceeding with the question they told me to forget cron because we 
> already know that cron is a part of the process. I mentioned about 
> running the date command and piping output through some kind of if/then 
> structure in a script that would match the date against a user's 
> birthday and if it matched, then to print out a message saying that it's 
> that person's birthday. That wasn't exactly what they were looking for 
> either. I suppose there must be a shell command somewhere for setting up 
> alarms like an alarm clock, but I don't know if that is what they were 
> looking for either.
> 
> In any case, it's probably an obvious question to someone, and it's a 
> little embarrassing that I missed it, but I always like to learn from my 
> experiences. Please think about the question and let me know how you 
> would solve this.
> 
> -Jim Butler
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

-- 
Stephen Leonard