[ale] Linux shell process

[Stephen Haywood]

I would question working for anyone who thinks they can judge your value as
a linux admin based on the answer to these kind of obscure questions.

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Jim Butler
<jimbutler1234567890 at gmail.com>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
>
>
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-- 
Stephen Haywood
Information Security Consultant
CISSP, GPEN, OSCP
T: @averagesecguy
W: averagesecurityguy.info
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