Few aspects of Unix system administration are more intimate than the relationship between the admin and their chosen shell. After all, the shell is the most fundamental interface to the system, the ...

The shell does far more than run commands. Here’s how Bash expands your input behind the scenes so you can write cleaner, ...

Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different. The Bourne-Again ...

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Once a script is prepared and tested, you can get a significant task completed simply by typing the script's name followed by any required arguments. Developing scripts to handle your more complicated ...

Every time we publish a Linux hack that uses a shell script, someone will chime in about how awful it is to program shell scripts. While we like the ubiquity and efficiency, we can’t disagree that the ...

One of the delights in Bash, zsh, or whichever shell tickles your fancy in your OSS distribution of choice, is the ease of which you can use scripts. These can be shell scripts, or use the Perl, ...

If you write a bash script that nobody else can understand, you're going to own that thing for the rest of your life too. Perl is really your answer here. They don't call it "the Swiss army chainsaw" ...

If you're not yet comfortable with writing scripts on Unix and Linux systems, this post might get you off to a healthy start. Creating a script on a Unix or Linux system can be dead easy or ...

This article is reprinted from the book A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming 3rd edition, with permission of the author and publisher ...