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

Finding the difference between files, patching


When multiple versions of a file are available, it is very useful when we can find the differences between files being highlighted rather than comparing two files manually. If the files are large, it is very difficult and time consuming to compare them by hand. This recipe illustrates how to generate differences between files highlighted with line numbers. When working on large files by multiple developers, when one of them has made changes and these changes need to be shown to the other, sending the entire source code to other developers manually is time consuming. Sending a difference file instead is very helpful as it consists of only lines which are changed, or added or removed and line numbers are attached with it. This difference file is called a patch file . We can add the changes specified in the patch file to the original source code by using the patch command. We can also revert the changes by patching again. Let us see how to do this...