Book Image

Mastering Linux Shell Scripting - Second Edition

By : Mokhtar Ebrahim, Andrew Mallett
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Linux Shell Scripting - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Mokhtar Ebrahim, Andrew Mallett

Overview of this book

In this book, you’ll discover everything you need to know to master shell scripting and make informed choices about the elements you employ. Grab your favorite editor and start writing your best Bash scripts step by step. Get to grips with the fundamentals of creating and running a script in normal mode, and in debug mode. Learn about various conditional statements' code snippets, and realize the power of repetition and loops in your shell script. You will also learn to write complex shell scripts. This book will also deep dive into file system administration, directories, and system administration like networking, process management, user authentications, and package installation and regular expressions. Towards the end of the book, you will learn how to use Python as a BASH Scripting alternative. By the end of this book, you will know shell scripts at the snap of your fingers and will be able to automate and communicate with your system with keyboard expressions.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Supplying arguments

If we create the $HOME/bin/args.py file we can see this in action. The file should be created as follows and made executable:

#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
print("Hello " + sys.argv[1])

If we run the script with a supplied argument, we should see something similar to the following screenshot:

Our code is still quite clean and simple; however, you may have noticed that we cannot combine the quoted text in the print statement with the argument. We use the + symbol to join or concatenate the two strings together. As there is no specific symbol to denote a variable or any other type of object, they cannot appear as static text within quotes.