Bash scripts are powerful, but with power comes great responsibility. It’s very easy for sloppy or poorly-planned code to do real damage, so it’s a good idea to be careful and practice defensive ...

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 ...

and only files matching my_test_here would make it onto do_something. I love the while-read pattern, but it just doesn't feel right that there's no simpler, built-in, idiomatic way to write a function ...

If you aren’t a Linux user and you watch someone who knows what they are doing use Bash — the popular command line interpreter — you might get the impression they type much faster than they actually ...

Imagine browsing the Web and having to type the full Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) path each time you visit a Web page—painful. However, since 1993, when browser bookmarks were added to the Mosaic ...

Decimals to Roman numerals—here we hit all the limitations of Bash shell scripting. My last few articles have given me a chance to relive my undergraduate computer science degree and code a Roman ...

Linux’s compgen command is not actually a Linux command. In other words, it’s not implemented as an executable file, but is instead a bash builtin. That means that it’s part of the bash executable. So ...

Linux built-ins are commands that are built into the shell, much like shelves that are built into a wall. You won’t find them as stand-alone files the way standard Linux commands are stored in ...