Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi guys, i am thinking of doing my final project on Unix shell scripting. Can anyone give me some sort of topics on unix shell scripting project that I can do in my final project.

Cheers....

You could write a script that examines an Apache web server log file and then based on defined criteria determines if there are robots spidering the site without a user agent that identify them as bots.

You could write the IP addresses to a file with the probability that the IP address is a bot, based on a scoring criteria.

You could do the classification using Bayes theory and encode this into your methodology.

Then, when finished, you can post here

We will use it on our log files !

That's a cool answer Neo. I kind of figured that's where you were headed when I started reading. It's always good to try and develop something, even for a project or homework, that is useful.

gsb1bee - Give us a little more detail. How familiar are you with scripting? What's a repetative task that you'd like to automate? Or some kind of processing that you'd like to do?

... and if it was in PHP with a configurable web interface for settings, ignore lists, scoring weights, etc. that would be even better

Thanx Neo and dday for your ideas and suggestions.

I did bash scripting 6 months ago and found very interesting and so thought of doing a final project on it because it is now very demanding in industry. I am not an advanced in scripting but can go through basic stuffs on it. I found Neo's idea very interesting but the thing is I am not that good at Apache and I want to do my scripting on Open Solaris OS.

What I thought to do th project based on combination of Shell script and ITIL or Shell scripting data loading but still I am unable to get my head around what is the good idea that I should use to automate the shell script in any area so that I can make it simple and keep it special. I am looking for the project which is not much much complicated but very simple. The project should be something that I can ask a question.

Well, the Apache suggestion would really just be scanning a log file and then doing some intelligent processing. (btw Neo, how would you identify a BOT? Just curious)

Maybe you could run some shell commands to check the size of certain folders and then back them up to a compressed file and clean them out based on a threshold. Something along that line. I know it's been done before, but if you do it on your own, it's a good learning tool on logic and capturing data in a variable.

That's the hard part - developing the method. When you have a solid method/plan, the coding is generally not very hard.

If I tell you how to do it, there is very little hard work to do

It is not easy to do (the logic) because you need to become familiar with detection theory. Signature detection? Anomaly detection? Hybrid (both)?