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Actually I saw script #2 on an interview question a little while back (not that the interviewer knew what it did; he didn't seem to have a programming backgroun

by eksith 13y ago

Actually I saw script #2 on an interview question a little while back (not that the interviewer knew what it did; he didn't seem to have a programming background). Don't exactly recall what the question was, but it was something to the effect of "what are your thoughts on the safety of the following script" or the like. The good thing about nix platforms is that you have nuclear options at your fingertips. The bad thing is that you can't be impulsive or an idiot because you have nuclear options at your fingertips ;)

VLM 13y ago
Ditto here, it must have been a management interview fad a decade or two ago. The sysadmin version of fizzbuzz. My particular version was one page script that wiped an existing software installation (and a bit more LOL) and dropped a new version on top of it. The kind of thing that has pretty much been eliminated by using git/etc as a distribution tech and/or puppet. So VLM... nice to meet you, here's the first version of our software upgrade script I was wondering what you'd change. I started laughing, pointed out a few things, he said I passed. It had a lot more wrong with it. Weird quoting mistakes (single vs double, also something along the lines of grep "-R blah blah"). And there were basic conceptual issues, like copying the binaries to /usr/local/bin before replacing the old distribution with the new one, such that you'd get old ones. And the path contained a version number and the script tried to change user PATH env variables ... to the old version path. The proper interview-style fix for my creative solution would be something like rm -Rf .svn instead of rm -Rf *, or bothering to check the output of pwd is longer than X characters using grep -c and some comparisons or playing games with chroot. Its a great interview question because you get a feel for the candidates style, are they most comfortable with chroot, or doing text manipulations of pwd etc or are they a minimalist who likes to make the smallest possible change or into rewriting the whole blasted thing or...

by eksith 13y ago

VLM 13y ago

Ditto here, it must have been a management interview fad a decade or two ago. The sysadmin version of fizzbuzz. My particular version was one page script that wiped an existing software installation (and a bit more LOL) and dropped a new version on top of it. The kind of thing that has pretty much been eliminated by using git/etc as a distribution tech and/or puppet. So VLM... nice to meet you, here's the first version of our software upgrade script I was wondering what you'd change. I started laughing, pointed out a few things, he said I passed. It had a lot more wrong with it. Weird quoting mistakes (single vs double, also something along the lines of grep "-R blah blah"). And there were basic conceptual issues, like copying the binaries to /usr/local/bin before replacing the old distribution with the new one, such that you'd get old ones. And the path contained a version number and the script tried to change user PATH env variables ... to the old version path. The proper interview-style fix for my creative solution would be something like rm -Rf .svn instead of rm -Rf *, or bothering to check the output of pwd is longer than X characters using grep -c and some comparisons or playing games with chroot. Its a great interview question because you get a feel for the candidates style, are they most comfortable with chroot, or doing text manipulations of pwd etc or are they a minimalist who likes to make the smallest possible change or into rewriting the whole blasted thing or...