Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi guys,

I am currently working as a system administration engineer, administering telecom applications on linux/unix platforms.

I want to learn new things and improve the ones that i have and for this i though to really work on some project or something but i lack of ideas.

I want to be able to apply existing knowledge, and also expanding this knowledge by working : basic C programming, bash&unix tools(awk, sed), python(begineer), databases(oracle,mysql) etc.

I thought sometime ago at something like a log statistics application, with monitoring different kind of logs(ex: data traffic), or following errors, warnings and build graphics for this. But i haven't any idea where i could start from and i thought maybe to start with something easy.

Any other ideas that could apply to system/application administration and make use of the skill areas above?

Any idea would be appreciated.

Thank you guys.

Consider automating your daily tasks. Use bash. Create a menu which calls the script you need to fix or look at things you routinely are asked to do. Some things will likely require invoking C code for example.

Robert Love 'Linux System Programming' has loads of example C code to look at or modify various system settings.

For automating stuff like : backup logs, search for new warnings, verify files sequences etc i have most of the scripts made in bash.

I would like to go further in getting more knowledge, involvin also c/python, maybe some graphics module or something...in order to gain knowledge on the above and maybe in the future i will get new ideas for apps to improve my work.

Thanks for your answer, i will check that book.