Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

A primer on cURL


cURL is a powerful utility that supports protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. It supports many features including POST, cookies, authentication, downloading partial files from a specified offset, referer, user agent string, extra headers, limit speed, maximum file size, progress bar, and so on. cURL is very useful when we play around with automating a web page usage sequence, and to retrieve data. This recipe is a list of the most important features of cURL.

Getting ready

cURL mostly doesn't come with any Linux distros; you may have to install it by using the package manager. By default, distributions ship with wget.

cURL usually dumps the downloaded files to stdout, and progress information to stderr. To avoid the progress information from being shown, we use the --silent option.

How to do it…

The curl command can be used to perform different activities, such as downloading, sending different HTTP requests, and specifying HTTP headers. Let's see how we can perform different...