Book Image

Command Line Fundamentals

By : Vivek Nagarajan
Book Image

Command Line Fundamentals

By: Vivek Nagarajan

Overview of this book

The most basic interface to a computer—the command line—remains the most flexible and powerful way of processing data and performing and automating various day-to-day tasks. Command Line Fundamentals begins by exploring the basics, and then focuses on the most common tool, the Bash shell (which is standard on all Linux and iOS systems). As you make your way through the book, you'll explore the traditional Unix command-line programs as implemented by the GNU project. You'll also learn to use redirection and pipelines to assemble these programs to solve complex problems. By the end of this book, you'll have explored the basics of shell scripting, allowing you to easily and quickly automate tasks.
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, you have been introduced to several concepts such as input, output, redirection, and pipelines. You have also learned basic text-processing tools, along with both common and uncommon use cases of these tools, to demonstrate their flexibility. At a conceptual level, several techniques related to processing tabular data have been explored.

A large number of details have been covered. If you are being introduced to these for the first time, you should attempt to understand the concepts at an abstract level and not be overwhelmed by details (which you can always refer to when in doubt). To this end, some additional complexities have been avoided in order to focus on the essential concepts. The students can pick up more nuances as they continue to learn and practice in the future, beyond this brief book.

In the next chapter, you will learn about several more concepts related to the shell, including basic regular expressions, shell expansion, and command substitution...