It was initially scheduled for last Saturday but upon request MSCC monthly meetup was re-scheduled for today. I thought that would give me sufficient time to craft some cool scripts that I could showcase during my presentation on Bash Scripting. Oh! I was wrong. I either didn’t get enough inspiration or simply I was lazy to write stuffs. Wait! How could I be lazy since I did get time to make some colorful slides. Ahaan … Inspiration then?

Back to topic, this morning Rajnee (a new LUGM recruit) texted & told me she could pick me up before going to the meetup. This was the first time she’d be attending an MSCC meetup. That was too cool, she picked me up around 10h00 & we arrived at the University of Mauritius a little before 10h30. On the way I called Ronny, he had some other priorities and might not show up. We initially planned to spare 15 minutes today & approve the new recruits of LUGM.

At UoM, I called up Yunus to find my way to Phase II, room 2.9. It wasn’t a tough task. I do know a little bit about UoM building layouts. Right infront of room 2.9, I saw Nayar and Aslam waiting. They reached earlier and inquired about the class. Seemed like it was occupied and it would be free as from 10h30. Fair enough for us. A short while later Daniel showed up followed by others.

Others? Who else?

Ironically, the projector in room 2.9 was black & white. I was like whaaaat? No way. I spent time to make colorful slides, I can’t show those in B&W. We then moved to room 2.10 and 2.11. Same issue. Hopefully, Jochen brought his projector. So, we returned to room 2.9 and used his projector.

I presented my love for Bash first. As I mentioned earlier, due to lack of inspiration, I could not dedicate more time to script examples but I assured the presentation would be beneficial to new folks in Linux, giving them an insight about command-line. I talked about pipes, redirects, standard streams and how these can be coupled with Bash scripting.

Daniel brought a programmer’s approach and described the limits of scripting, as when should one shift to program something rather than scripting. He also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code.

In the end, Jochen brought us PowerShell. We went back in history, discussed MS-DOS and Microsoft’s evolution to PowerShell. Yes, Microsoft has been slow on this decision. Questions sprouted along the way as Jochen proceeded with PowerShell talks. I shot about a server having just PowerShell, like no GUI, and yes that’s available with Microsoft Server Core. Pritvi shot about connecting to a headless server using PowerShell. Yes, indeed that’s possible too but it’s not as in SSH (if you might be thinking that way). Jochen also highlighted the similarities with Bash, like having cmdlets (a PowerShell feature) aliased to popular Bash commands like, ls, mv, rmdir, mkdir etc.

After the presentations some of us moved to Bagatelle to have lunch. Meetup thus ended on a happy note over tea, panini, pita bread, sandwiches and pasta.

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Photos taken on mobile by Nadim. Indoor ones came bad due to lighting.