Book Image

Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Techniques

By : Vedran Dakic, Jasmin Redzepagic
Book Image

Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Techniques

By: Vedran Dakic, Jasmin Redzepagic

Overview of this book

Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Techniques begins by taking you through the basics of the shell and command-line utilities. You’ll start by exploring shell commands for file, directory, service, package, and process management. Next, you’ll learn about networking - network, firewall and DNS client configuration, ssh, scp, rsync, and vsftpd, as well as some network troubleshooting tools. You’ll also focus on using the command line to find and manipulate text content, via commands such as cut, egrep, and sed. As you progress, you'll learn how to use shell scripting. You’ll understand the basics - input and output, along with various programming concepts such as loops, variables, arguments, functions, and arrays. Later, you’ll learn about shell script interaction and troubleshooting, before covering a wide range of examples of complete shell scripts, varying from network and firewall configuration, through to backup and concepts for creating live environments. This includes examples of performing scripted virtual machine installation and administration, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack provisioning and bulk user creation for testing environments. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll have gained the knowledge and confidence you need to use shell and command-line scripts.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Using the most common shell commands

Let's now switch our attention to learning a basic set of Linux shell commands. We're going to discuss commands to manipulate files and folders, processes, archives, and links. We'll do that via a scenario that is going to involve many steps.

Getting ready

We still need the same virtual machines as with our previous recipes.

How to do it…

In order for us to be able to use shell commands, we have to start the shell. If we're using the CLI, we just need to log in and we're going to enter the shell session. If we're using a GUI approach, we have to find a GUI Terminal in our application menu. After that, we can start typing commands:

  1. For starters, let's use a basic set of commands to work with files and directories.

Let's list the content of the current directory:

ls -al

The output will look similar to this:

Figure 1.6 – Standard output for...