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February 24, 2004
Useful stuff for scripters and admins
This isn't directly related to Exchange, but I discovered it while setting up my Exchange server at home, so I thought I'd pass it on. In brief, Microsoft's new Services for Unix 3.5 is an amzing bit of goodness to have available when writing and using scripts.
Forget the NIS/AD/NFS services and interoperability; it's all sweet, but that's not my point. The absolute blow-me-away feature is the Interix POSIX sub-system. Previous versions of SFU included the MKS POSIX subsystem, which was functional but nothing to write home about.
Interix is amazing because -- get this -- you can invoke Windows binaries and scripts from within the Unix shell and shell scripts. I can write a Korn shell script, using awk and sed and all the nifty tools available on the Unix command line, and pipe input and output into VBscript and Jscript.
So how did I discover this? My installation archive of Exchange got mangled by some idiot filename conversion settings, and I discovered this while running through the install process. Happily, the damage was done in a predictable fashion, so I was able to fix everything using a few timely ksh scripts to rename the affected files based on regular expressions.
I'm sure I could have done the same thing with VBscript, but honestly, it would have taken far longer and required much more scripting. I was able to do many of the renames in a one-liner. And doing it this way saved me a drive back in to work over the weekend.
Moral of the story: having multiple tools in your toolbox is good.
Posted by Devin Ganger at February 24, 2004 03:28 PM