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 ...

Linux Journal, representing 25+ years of publication, is the original magazine of the global Open Source community.

To start your journey with the Linux command line, it's important to know a few things before diving in. These aspects of the terminal are fundamental to getting the most out of the tool. Shall we ...

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 ...

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 ...

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" ...

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 ...

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 ...

I have a script that calls child scripts depending on conditions. All of the child scripts source in a common file that contains shared functions. At the moment each script has to source this file ...