Book Image

Bash Cookbook

By : Ron Brash, Ganesh Sanjiv Naik
Book Image

Bash Cookbook

By: Ron Brash, Ganesh Sanjiv Naik

Overview of this book

In Linux, one of the most commonly used and most powerful tools is the Bash shell. With its collection of engaging recipes, Bash Cookbook takes you through a series of exercises designed to teach you how to effectively use the Bash shell in order to create and execute your own scripts. The book starts by introducing you to the basics of using the Bash shell, also teaching you the fundamentals of generating any input from a command. With the help of a number of exercises, you will get to grips with the automation of daily tasks for sysadmins and power users. Once you have a hands-on understanding of the subject, you will move on to exploring more advanced projects that can solve real-world problems comprehensively on a Linux system. In addition to this, you will discover projects such as creating an application with a menu, beginning scripts on startup, parsing and displaying human-readable information, and executing remote commands with authentication using self-generated Secure Shell (SSH) keys. By the end of this book, you will have gained significant experience of solving real-world problems, from automating routine tasks to managing your systems and creating your own scripts.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Creating a lame utility HTTP server


In this recipe, we will discuss the cURL tool in Linux. The cURL tool is used for transferring the data from or to a server. It supports many protocols, and http is one of them. cURL is used to transfer the data from URL. It has so many tricks to offer, such as http post, ftp post, user authentication, proxy support, file transfer, SSL connections, cookies, and similar.

Getting ready

Besides having a Terminal open, you need to ensure that you have curl installed on your system.

How to do it…

We will learn about HTTP GET and POST methods using curl in Linux. Now, we will see examples of GET and POST:

  1. GET: The HTTP GET method is used to request a data from a specified resource. The command is the example of HTTP GET and is accepting JSON formatted data:
$ curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" -H "Accept:application/json" -X GET http://host/resource/name

Another example of HTTP GET, which is accepting XML formatted data is as follows:

$ curl -H "Content-Type:application...