Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Clif Flynt, Sarath Lakshman, Shantanu Tushar
Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Clif Flynt, Sarath Lakshman, Shantanu Tushar

Overview of this book

The shell is the most powerful tool your computer provides. Despite having it at their fingertips, many users are unaware of how much the shell can accomplish. Using the shell, you can generate databases and web pages from sets of files, automate monotonous admin tasks such as system backups, monitor your system's health and activity, identify network bottlenecks and system resource hogs, and more. This book will show you how to do all this and much more. This book, now in its third edition, describes the exciting new features in the newest Linux distributions to help you accomplish more than you imagine. It shows how to use simple commands to automate complex tasks, automate web interactions, download videos, set up containers and cloud servers, and even get free SSL certificates. Starting with the basics of the shell, you will learn simple commands and how to apply them to real-world issues. From there, you'll learn text processing, web interactions, network and system monitoring, and system tuning. Software engineers will learn how to examine system applications, how to use modern software management tools such as git and fossil for their own work, and how to submit patches to open-source projects. Finally, you'll learn how to set up Linux Containers and Virtual machines and even run your own Cloud server with a free SSL Certificate from letsencrypt.org.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Enumerating file type statistics

Linux supports many file types. This recipe describes a script that enumerates through all the files inside a directory and its descendants, and prints a report with details on types of files (files with different file types), and the count of each file type. This recipe is an exercise on writing scripts to enumerate through many files and collect details.

Getting ready

On Unix/Linux systems, file types are not defined by the file extension (as Microsoft Windows does). Unix/Linux systems use the file command, which examines the file's contents to determine a file's type. This recipe collects file type statistics for a number of files. It stores the count of files of the same type in an associative array.

The associative...