Discover the techniques that help popular scripts succeed.

Variables often look like $var, but they also look like $1, $*, $? and $$. Let's take a look at what all these $ values can tell you. A lot of important values are ...

Do you want to create a Shell script in your Linux system? This guide will take you through how to create a shell script using multiple text editors, how to add comments, and how to use Shell ...

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 ...

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 ...

This post follows up on Part 1 by examining the many ways that you can test the value of variables – e.g., whether they equal particular strings like “yes” or “no”, if they have a numeric value, if ...

We often read (including in the book Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper) that if we pass variable names as parameters to functions, they will be treated as string literals and cannot be ...

A software vendor has given us a script that sets some environmental variables. It needs to be run manually by cd-ing into the directory and executing '. ./.script.sh'. This seems a bit weird to me - ...

You need to package up a bunch of files, send them somewhere, and do something with them at the destination. It isn’t an uncommon scenario. The obvious answer is to create an archive — a zip or tar ...