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

Chapter 8. Advanced Scripting Techniques

In this chapter, we will introduce the following recipes:

  • Calculating and reducing the runtime of a script
  • Writing one-line conditional statements and loops
  • Avoiding command not found warnings/errors and improving portability
  • Creating a config file and using it in tandem with your scripts
  • Improving your shell – GCC and command line colors
  • Adding aliases, and altering user paths/variables
  • Echoing output to raw terminal devices
  • Creating simple frontend GUIs for Bash scripts
  • Compiling and installing your own Bash Shell
  • Recording terminal sessions for automation
  • Writing high-quality scripts by example