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)

Common scripting mistakes

Writing a script will present many problems, including how to design it, how to find the right solutions to different problems, and how to make all of this usable in the target environment. These can be things you can easily solve in a couple of minutes, or things you will spend days or even weeks trying to solve. All this time will probably just be a small percentage of the total time you will spend debugging and troubleshooting scripts. Writing and troubleshooting scripts are two wholly different things – while you usually write your own scripts from scratch, you will not only debug and troubleshoot your own code.

Writing requires skill and deep knowledge of your environment, but it can be argued that to debug and troubleshoot, you need even more understanding of both your task and the way your script is trying to accomplish it. In this recipe, we are going to work on the skills you need to understand not only how to troubleshoot scripts you have...