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

Gathering and aggregating system information


In this section, we are going to discuss the dmidecode Linux tool, which will gather information about the system such as CPU information, server, memory, and networking.

Getting ready

Besides having a terminal open, we need to remember a few concepts:

  • We are going to use some commands that will give us information about the Kernel, Linux distribution, physical server information, system uptime, network information, memory information, and CPU information.
  • By using this, anyone can create scripts to gather system information.

How to do it...

  1. We can get details about the Linux distribution that you are working on. These distributions have a release file that you can locate in the /etc/ folder. Now, open a terminal and enter the following command to get the information regarding the Linux distribution you are working on:
cat /etc/*-release
  1. The preceding option has an alternative, and the alternative is the version file that's present in the /proc folder...