Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Dec 12, 2011 16:44 UTC (Mon) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222)
In reply to: Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks) by Cyberax
Parent article: Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

LastLogon: 129681773131629678
LastLogonTimestamp: 129681773131629678

Quest Software fixed this in their product, which is, fortunately "free beer."

Somehow, I think we've been trolled. Smoke signals?

Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Dec 12, 2011 17:27 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (7 responses)

Uhm. That's a timestamp in awful ActiveDirectory format. No need for third-party software.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/m...

Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Dec 12, 2011 18:05 UTC (Mon) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (6 responses)

Ah, yes - so I hand the above link to a new system administrator who has to use Powershell, ask him to give me a list of Last Logon Dates for anyone who hasn't logged on in 30 days, and.....then what?

This issue should have been addressed *before* Microsoft releasted the Active Directory tools for Powershell, not after, and not by requiring some kind of conversion kluge.

Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Dec 12, 2011 18:31 UTC (Mon) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (5 responses)

Oh, and I did do some research into this. It is possible to do, but I don't find the solution to be any indication of how great Powershell is compared to the other UNIX shells. Yeah, there's a system function to convert this, but again, we're supposed to be making it easier for administrators to do their work, not requiring them to do research into date/time conversions from a "standard" tool.

It is good, as far as I'm soncerned, that Windows system administrators now have a decent shell to work with in their day-to-day activities, and I laud Microsoft for this. In my shop, it has been hard to get administrators to script *anything* before Powershell, as they were not willing to use Perl, Awk, Python, etc. And Powershell does have some interesting innovations. But it still strikes me as odd how a discussion of UNIX shells and their evolution turned into an argument about how great Powershell is compared to all the other methods people have used to perform system administration activities.

Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Dec 12, 2011 18:48 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

But it still strikes me as odd how a discussion of UNIX shells and their evolution turned into an argument about how great Powershell is compared to all the other methods people have used to perform system administration activities.

Well, it didn't start out that way, there was just one "PowerShell is neat" post and in response a flurry of negative responses were written which lead to a lively discussion.

Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Dec 12, 2011 21:08 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

That's mostly a problem of the tool itself. AD is just braindead in many respects. We just have to live with it.

Samba4 on Linux has the same behavior, btw.

Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Dec 12, 2011 21:34 UTC (Mon) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (2 responses)

Interesting.

Does Samba4 or related utility have the fix?

I was a bit surprised to learn about the [System.DateTime]::FromFileTime() function in Powershell. I did a lot of research into this previously and didn't see that.

Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Dec 12, 2011 21:41 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

No. Why should there be a fix?

LastLogon is a valid timestamp, just in a very braindead format (in 100-s nanosecond increments since 1601).

Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Dec 13, 2011 16:20 UTC (Tue) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link]

There should be a fix because people need to use that information, not dig around on the Internet, figure out how braindead the timestamp is, and come up with a scheme to read it in human-readable form. Quest Software fixed it by providing a conversion method.

I was asking about fixing *accessibility to the information.* Which is far more important to me than what shell handles what arguments, and how the pipelines work.