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)

Chapter 14: Interacting with Shell Scripts

We are almost done with explaining the basic concepts of scripting, but before we can say we are completely done with them, we need to learn how to interact with shell scripts. This isn't always necessary in shell scripting, but it may apply to most situations. For example, it's one thing to create a script that does one job and one job only. It's completely different to create a script that requires us to make some choices as it gets executed. If nothing else, this second type is a prime candidate for shell script interaction. In this chapter, we are going to cover three different ways to deal with shell script interaction.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

  • Creating text-based interactive scripts
  • Using expect to automate repetitive tasks based on text output
  • Using dialog for menu-driven interactive scripts