It is easy to dismiss bash — the typical Linux shell program — as just a command prompt that allows scripting. Bash, however, is a full-blown programming language. I wouldn’t presume to tell you that ...

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 ...

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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" ...

The first software that I was actually paid to develop was a 2-page shell script that prompted the user for a dozen or so pieces of information, before launching a set of cooperating processes. Those ...

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 ...

Bash, aka the Bourne-Again Shell, has a newly discovered security hole. And, for many Unix or Linux Web servers, it's a major problem. The flaw involves how Bash evaluates environment variables. With ...

Shell scripting is one of those skills that are absolutely invaluable on especially UNIX and BSD-based systems like the BSDs, the two zillion Linux distributions as well as MacOS. Yet not every shell ...

#!/bin/bash clear echo "Hello world!" The first line tells the operating system what shell to use to interpret the script and the location of the shell. Double quotes do not prevent Bash from ...