There are four major species of Unix sysad:

1. The TECHNICAL THUG. Usually a systems programmer who has been forced into system administration; writes scripts in a polyglot of the Bourne shell, sed, C, awk, perl, and APL.
2. The ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST. Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration.
3. The MANIAC. Usually an aging cracker who discovered that neither the Mossad nor Cuba are willing to pay a living wage for computer espionage. Fell into system administration; occasionally approaches major competitors with indesp schemes.
4. The IDIOT. Usually a cretin, morphodite, or old COBOL programmer selected to be the system administrator by a committee of cretins, morphodites, and old COBOL programmers.

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SITUATION: Users want phone list application.

* TECHNICAL THUG: Writes RDBMS in perl and Smalltalk. Users give up and go back to post-it notes.
* ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Oracle. Users give up and go back to post-it notes.
* MANIAC: Tells the users to use flat files and grep, the way God meant man to keep track of phone numbers. Users give up and go back to post-it notes.
* IDIOT:

% dd ibs=80 if=/dev/rdisk001s7 | grep "Fred"

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