Basic Required UNIX Skills?

xirlosan writes "I'd like to get a job working in a UNIX environment, be it programming or administrating UNIX machines. My question is this: What skills are absolutly 'must haves' and what other skills are attractive to employers when looking for a job in this field? I have my BS in Computer Science and have a fair amount of experience with Linux and Solaris, so I'm interested in what more I need. I looked for jobs at Monster, and there are so many skills the recommend it's hard to figure out what the most critical are. Any help would be certainly appreciated."

Comments

vi

[Perdo]

Learn vi.

It will teach you everything you need to know about why unix is the way it is...

It will break you of your bad microsoft habits.

Or it will break any desire you have to learn the rest of unix.

food for thought:

unix will never ask you, "are you sure?"

Unix assumes you never miss a keystroke, that you are perfect and know everything already.

vi is to ed as pi is to ln

Re:vi

[MrResistor]

Agreed.

I would add, though, that vi is ubiquitous. Emacs is available for every *nix, vi is included with every *nix, and you will encounter situations where, for whatever reason, you won't be allowed to install the apps you would usually use.

Re:vi

[pthisis]

Also, learn ed. You may need it someday. On my system (FreeBSD 4.6), ed is installed as /bin/ed, and vi is installed as /usr/bin/vi

Definitely.

Use vi frequently for a while, that vi skill will pay off if you get dropped into ed. Learn enough ed to fix things up and get /usr/bin mounted. And keep a statically linked copy of your favorite small(ish) editor and of sash (and scp/ftp/wget/netcat if you can swing it) on the root partition --libc.so _will_ eventually die on one of your machines, and having sash and vi available for recovery will make you much, much happier.

Plus, it'll make the local MCSE's head explode if he sees you using it

Unless he remembers edlin from his DOS days

Sumner

Re:Since you're just starting out...

[mosch]

I'd like to add some more concrete things to the sysadmin skills:

• be able to use vi. it's the lingua franca, and it'll be on every unix box.
• be able to use fsck in a manner that's not equivalent to just running fsck -y
• understand how RAID is implemented on your platforms. for solaris, you should know how to use veritas, and you shouldn't get confused by terms like disks, subdisks, and plexes
• know how to run extended diagnostics on those sun boxes
• know how to trace a process and be able to quickly parse the output
• know enough networking to be able to accurately tell which machine is causing the problem in a multi-machine clusterfuck
• know how not to kill your boss when he tells you 'yah, that stuff I had you do last week? blow all that work away and do it my way.'
• know not to be a dick about GPL v BSD or open source versus closed
• learn to document things. system setups, network setups, you name it, you'll need it at some point.
• learn how to use a task list. you'll have shitloads of things to do, and if you're like me, you'll forget something if you don't write it down
• be competent in your use of MS Office. Yes MS is evil, it's also the way people in the business world communicate. Deal with it.
• Know how to tell if a process is I/O bound, memory bound, or CPU bound.
• Know where to look for performance tweaks, even if you don't know them by heart

I'd list more, but I'm already getting quite rambly.