BASH YOUR WAY THROUGH EXAM STUDY

Over the years, I’ve seen many approaches to certification exam study. You can do everything from taking an exam blind — the idea being that it will help you get a feel for what questions and topics are on the exam, even if you fail — to sitting through weeks of expensive vendor training designed to help you pass.

Between those two ends of the spectrum reside all the books, test engines, flashcards and other products intended to help you prepare.

This past week, however, I ran across one of the most unique study methods I’ve seen in a while, and I wonder whether the concept can be adapted to more uses. A candidate, who asked to remain anonymous, wrote a very simple Bash script. That script randomly pulls the name of a utility from a list of those you need to know for Linux Professional Institute (LPI) exams, and then accesses the man page for that utility. It takes key items from the man page (freely available in every Linux distribution, as well as online from numerous sites), parses what it finds, and presents it in a quiz format.

For example, one time the candidate would see several of the options that work with the ls command, but not what they do. He would then have to correctly identify what each option does, and check his answers by pressing a key that then revealed only that portion of the man listing for ls. Many iterations later, the same question might appear, only now it would be the description (”Which option with ls will show the index number of each file?”), and he’d have to guess the option (-i).

It wasn’t a perfect script by any means - grammatical errors and other oddities crop up when you’re just parsing man pages to get your questions - but it impressed me immensely. And that fact that the study solution he had created was free opened my eyes to thinking about other implementations.

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Certification, Linux
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