Here are some basic skills to get started with bash, one of the best shells for preparing and using scripts on Linux. Scripting in Linux–putting commands into a file so you can run them as a group—is ...

Linux, known for its robustness and flexibility, has been a favorite among developers, system administrators, and technology enthusiasts. One of the pillars of Linux's capabilities is its inherent ...

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 ...

Bash scripting is every Linux administrator’s Swiss Army knife. Learn how using a for-loop in conjunction with Bash scripts can produce powerful results. Bash scripting remains a staple of my ...

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 ...

A recent post about debugging constructs surprised me. There were quite a few comments about how you didn’t need a debugger, as long as you had printf. For that matter, we’ve all debugged systems ...

Many bash scripts use arguments to control the commands that they will run and the information that will be provided to the people running them. This post examines a number of ways that you can verify ...

Jack Wallen shows you a nifty trick for easily starting, stopping, pausing, and resuming your VirtualBox virtual machines on a headless Linux server. There’s a nifty feature that comes with VirtualBox ...

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 ...

I've got a script that runs a program in a loop. The program writes a file, and the script extracts a value out of that file. If the value doesn't meet the criteria, the loop continues. One thing that ...