When existing admin tools just aren’t cutting it, you can write your own. We look at the excellent Bash scripting and Python programming languages.

Fairly recently, a new top-like tool has received quite a bit of attention: bashtop, like other top-like tools, shows stats for the processor, memory, disks, network, and processes. Although it might sound like any other top tool, the interface is exceptional.

Lazy … er, smart … administrators are hard at work in the background via scripts, cascading scripts, and cron jobs.