Book Image

Mastering Bash

By : Giorgio Zarrelli
Book Image

Mastering Bash

By: Giorgio Zarrelli

Overview of this book

System administration is an everyday effort that involves a lot of tedious tasks, and devious pits. Knowing your environment is the key to unleashing the most powerful solution that will make your life easy as an administrator, and show you the path to new heights. Bash is your Swiss army knife to set up your working or home environment as you want, when you want. This book will enable you to customize your system step by step, making your own real, virtual, home out of it. The journey will take you swiftly through the basis of the shell programming in Bash to more interesting and challenging tasks. You will be introduced to one of the most famous open source monitoring systems—Nagios, and write complex programs with it in any languages. You’ll see how to perform checks on your sites and applications. Moving on, you’ll discover how to write your own daemons so you can create your services and take advantage of inter-process communication to let your scripts talk to each other. So, despite these being everyday tasks, you’ll have a lot of fun on the way. By the end of the book, you will have gained advanced knowledge of Bash that will help you automate routine tasks and manage your systems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Environment variables

Let's call it a proof of concept more than a real means to have processes communicate with each other. Who would really want to mess with the environment? Anyway, we are exploring some viable means to IPC, so we can take this in account even though we will not use it in the first instance. Let's have a look at env:

env
LS_COLORS=REDACTED
XDG_MENU_PREFIX=xfce-
LANG=en_GB.utf8
DISPLAY=:0.0
XDG_VTNR=7
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-MgHTC62oCYDp/agent.1121
GLADE_CATALOG_PATH=:
XDG_SESSION_ID=2
XDG_GREETER_DATA_DIR=/var/lib/lightdm/data/zarrelli
USER=zarrelli
GLADE_MODULE_PATH=:
DESKTOP_SESSION=xfce
PWD=/home/zarrelli
HOME=/home/zarrelli
GUAKE_TAB_UUID=b07321dd-a221-41bd-8ecc-0ae94b9082b9
SSH_AGENT_PID=1159
QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11
XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/xfce4:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/:/usr/share
XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=xfce
GLADE_PIXMAP_PATH=:
GTK_MODULES=gail:atk...