Randal K. Michael is a UNIX Systems Administrator working as a contract consultant. He teaches UNIX shell scripting in corporate settings, where he writes shell scripts to address a variety of problems and tasks ranging from monitoring systems to replicating large databases. He has more than 30 years of experience in the industry and 15 years of experience as a UNIX Systems Administrator, working on AIX, HP-UX, Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris.