In many cases we will be interested in doing something before and / or after the execution of a task, for example:
Before:
- Maybe we need to open a VPN connection to get a connection to a remote server
- To create a snapshot of the entire disk of a remote client to copy data without interferences
- To stop some services before to copy their data (Zimbra, MySQL, ....)
- etc.
After:
- To close the VPN connection we had opened before
- To make sure that certain files are consistent: check files creation date and time, check if compressed bzip files are decompressed without errors, ...
- etc.
We will use the scripts to program these actions, and we will be able to develop new scripts and even to share them with others.