Automation - System Administration.

System administrator writes scripts that the system can execute at a particular time each day,week or month. Tasks that are common and often repeated,tedious are best performed through automation. Two question came in our mind when think about automation which are "What can be automated?" and "What should be automated?". Following are few tasks that can be performed through automation.

1) Adding new users
2) Process monitoring
3) File search and removal.
4) Configuration changes on servers.
5) Getting servers information.( Big environment)
6) Software Installation.
7) Remote administration tasks.

The above tasks can be performed by writing scripts. Scripts are program that can interact with the operating system using OS commands.There are many scripting language that can be used to write scripts like shell(Korn,bash),Perl,Python and others.

Tasks can be automated with cron services where we can execute certain scripts at a particular time,day,week or month.

5 Useful Linux Touch command

1) Create an empty file
Below will create  0 bytes file called 'test123'. It will change the modification/access timestamp.

#touch test123

Touch -c avoid creating non-existence file.

2)Create new file's timestamp

#touch -t 05070915 test123

3)Change modification time

# touch -m test123

4) Change access time

# touch -a test123

5)Copy  other file's timestamp.

#touch try123 -r test123