The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 22—Mentor the young SysAdmins
When I first started, I was a young and innocent SysAdmin. I was fortunate because I worked at a couple different jobs where other, seasoned SysAdmins were willing to mentor me and encourage me. None of them laughed at me when I asked what must have seemed to them to have answers that were blindingly obvious. None of these patient SysAdmins ever told me to RTFM.
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 19—Backup everything frequently
Author’s note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 21 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with some changes to update the...
Perl and Raku Conference will be held June 27-29, 2025 in Greenville, SC, USA
David Both to be the keynote speaker The Perl and Raku Conference for 2025 is coming up June 27-29, 2025, and it’s set to be...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 17— Use your favorite editor
Author’s note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 19 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with some changes to update the...
Linux Philosophy articles of 2024
Having read a lot of books like, "Linux and the Unix Philosophy," by Mike Gancarz1, and "The Art of Unix Programming," by Eric S. Raymond2,...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 15 — Strive For Elegance
Author’s note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 17 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with some changes to update the...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 10 — Use common sense naming
Typing is not my forte and the Lazy SysAdmin does everything possible to reduce typing. I take that seriously. This tenet expands on that but there is much more to it than just reducing the amount of typing I need to do. It is also about the readability of scripts and naming things so that they are more understandable.
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 07 — Automate Everything
SysAdmins are most productive when creating the shell programs that automate the solutions that they have conceived while appearing to be unproductive. The more automation we have in place the more time we have available to fix real problems when they occur and to contemplate how to automate even more than we already have.
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 03 — Everything is a File
Author's note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 5 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with some changes. This is one...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 02 — Transforming Data Streams
Author's note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 4 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with some changes. My article about...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 01 — Data Streams, the universal interface
Everything in Linux revolves around streams of data – particularly text streams.
I recently Googled “data stream” and most of the top hits are concerned with processing huge amounts of streaming data in single entities such as streaming video and audio, or financial institutions processing streams consisting of huge numbers of individual transactions. This is not what we are talking about here although the concept is the same and a case could be made that current applications use the stream processing functions of Linux as the model for processing many types of data.
The Linux Truth
Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things. Doug Gwyn This...
What is the Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins?
The Unix Philosophy is an important part of what makes Unix unique and powerful. Much has been written about the Unix Philosophy and the Linux philosophy is essentially the same as the Unix philosophy because of its direct line of descent from Unix.