Dana French: Wikis

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Dana L. French (1958 - ) is a prominent U.S. computer scientist working in the fields of business continuity, disaster recovery, high availability, virtualization and data center automation. His approach to system administration is based on supporting an organizations business functions rather than the computer systems. This approach is credited with causing global shift in the way Unix system administrators perform their work.

He has designed and written numerous software packages to automate the methodologies involved in business continuity. These software packages are related to disaster recovery, high availability, virtualization, and content management for web based documentation. He also holds copyrights, trademarks, and patents for methodologies related to business continuity and system administration, he is also credited with coining the commonly used information technology phrase "enterprise wide unique".

French is well known in the Unix community for his advanced shell programming skills and is a noted advocate of Korn Shell programming. He provides source code for most of his programming work on-line free of charge. One of his most well known and widely used shell libraries is "shell curses", which is a shell script implementation of the "C" language "Curses" library. Another is "kshSQL" which is a Korn Shell implementation of a complete SQL database system. French is also the author of "shunix", which is a project to implement all of the GNU Unix utilities entirely in shell script code.

French is well known in the programming community as providing a MicroEMACS binary executable repository for a very wide variety of operating systems. MicroEMACS is a widely used programmers text editor. Linus Torvalds, the developer of linux, is a notable MicroEMACS user, and is known to frequent this site. French has provided continuous access to this MicroEMACS repository since 1995.