The latest article in my System Administration Toolkit series at IBM developerWorks has been released. This article on ways of simplifying and standardizing your environment and command-line tools within a heterogeneous environment. As someone who regularly switches between Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris, to name but a few, I will often find myself using the wrong command on one host, but one which is perfectly valid on another. I’ve developed a number of different methods and solutions for that over the years, and this article covers the main solutions, including:

• Using aliases
• Using inline shell functions
• Using scripts
• Using a single source

Read System Administration Toolkit: Standardizing your UNIX command-line tools