Tips on Unix Scripting Interview Questions

[Hunki]

Please suggest some useful and important tips on how to tactfully and successfully tackle them.

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

The best advice I can give is to just answer them as best you can. Do NOT try to bluff your way through them. If you don't know, say you don't know.

I will have a lot more respect for someone that says they don't know than someone that starts spouting a bunch of crap and tries hide the fact that they don't know.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The best possible advice is to know enough shell, awk, and Perl to be able to handle any reasonable question.

The good news is that there are usually several ways to solve a problem so rather than answering specific questions, list the various approaches to solving a problem.

Be prepared for a question like "What was the last project in which you participated that required scripting/coding skills?"

Sometimes the best answer is "I don't know."

[Geoff Wild]

Are you going to an interview - or are you giving one?

Going to one:

Main tip - be honest - if you don't know the answer say so - but add how you would find out.

IE - look in manual, man pages, contact HP, etc.

Giving one:

See how the person answers - are they guessing?



Rgds...Geoff

[Bill Hassell]

If I am interviewing someone for a sysadmin position where scripting skills are important, I ask about scripts that the candidate wrote, and some of the tasks that were solved with those scripts. I also ask about reliability and error checking techniques that have been commonly used and lastly, have them look at a small script to describe what it does. The last step can be intimidating, especially in an interview so I pick something small (less than one page in length) but with several common techniques. I don't expect people to remember obscure options - that's what the man pages are for. But inspecting old scripts and fixing or changing them is a very common sysadmin task.

If you are the one answering the questions, the best preparation is to read lots of scripts. Here are two sites with practical scripting examples:

http://shelldorado.com
ftp://ftp.hpux.dk/mirror/hprc.external.hp.com/sysadmin/coolscripts/

The second one is an old copy of an HP site where I stored a bunch of scripts (almost all have been updated). I'm working to get that site updated after it went out of service last year.

[Yogeeraj_1]

Hi,

Ability to read and understand a script comes first. Most of the time scripts have alreadby been written. Knowledge of AWK and PERL are becoming more and more desirable.

good luck!
kind regards
yogeeraj