Automation
What do you mean by automation?
With regards to computers, we are talking about repetitive tasks being set up to be handled by the computer without any human input. We are talking about scripts. So if you normally check the activity logs every morning at 7:00 a.m. to make sure that there were no errors or failures during the night, you can set up a scheduled task that will allow the computer to do what you normally do. Think about it: Usually you will
- Sign in to a server
- Go to a specific directory
- Pick an activity log (or logs) and go through each one of them looking for identifying features of a failure. Usually you are looking for a keyword like ERROR or ORA-ERROR or something identifiable to you.
- When you find such an identifier there is usually specific action that may or may not have to be done depending on the circumstance.
- Move on to the next activity log until you are done.
In a situation like this you can write a script that will imitate exactly the keystrokes that you enter, except the computer does it. Now, what do you do when you hit a decision, as in step #4? In that case you have to make a decision about what you want the script to do or not to do. If there is always one specific action that always happens if a specific error occurs, then you can set up the script to do that task, just like you would do if you were there. But if there are a couple of ways this scenario could run its course, then maybe what you will do is set up the script to just email you (or alert you on your pager you if you set it up that way) that this specific error occurred. Then you know that you need to log in and take care of business. But if you don't get paged or emailed, then there is no problem, and you can remain focus on the task that you were doing. You just saved yourself time, made sure that the activity logs got checked every day (in case you forgot) and helped make the activities of the company a little more consistent in their operation.
What Kinds of Scripts are There?
Depending on what Operating System you are using, there are several scripting languages available to you.
Windows
In the Windows environment there are several choices, DOS is always around, waiting to be used, Winbatch is available, as is Perl. Of them, Perl is the strongest and transfers very easily to other platforms like Unix and even Macintosh.
Unix
Depending on what shell version is used on your Unix machine (Korn, Bourne, C) you can use their native scripting abilities, Perl exists on Unix also, Tcl and Python.
Generally in Unix either a shell script or Perl script is generally used. There are syntactical differences between the various shell variations so Perl is probably the most consistent of the scripting languages to utilize. That being said, Perl takes some learning, shell scripts are easier to learn, and allowing for differences, shell scripts are probably more predominant.
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