Book Image

Working with Linux ??? Quick Hacks for the Command Line

By : Bogdan Vaida, Petru I»ôfan
Book Image

Working with Linux ??? Quick Hacks for the Command Line

By: Bogdan Vaida, Petru I»ôfan

Overview of this book

Websites, online services, databases, and pretty much every other computer that offers public services runs on Linux. From small servers to clusters, Linux is anywhere and everywhere. With such a broad usage, the demand for Linux specialists is ever growing. For the engineers out there, this means being able to develop, interconnect, and maintain Linux environments. This book will help you increase your terminal productivity by using Terminator, Guake and other tools. It will start by installing Ubuntu and will explore tools and techniques that will help you to achieve more work with less effort. Next, it will then focus on Terminator, the ultimate terminal, and vim, one of the most intelligent console editors. Futhermore, the readers will see how they can increase their command line productivity by using sed, find, tmux, network, autoenv. The readers will also see how they can edit files without leaving the terminal and use the screen space efficiently and copy-paste like a pro. Towards the end, we focus on network settings, Git hacks, and creating portable environments for development and production using Docker. Through this book, you will improve your terminal productivity by seeing how to use different tools.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Shell scripting libraries


To really take advantage of automating tasks using shell scripts, it's important to organize all common tasks into reusable commands and have them available in the path. To do this, it's a good idea to create a bin folder inside the home directory for the scripts, and a bin/lib directory for storing common pieces of code. When working with lots of shell scripts, it's important to reuse large pieces of functionality. This can be achieved by writing library functions for your shell scripts, functions that you can call from multiple places.

Here we will create a library script called util.sh, which will be sourced in other scripts. By sourcing the script, we get access to functions and variables from inside the library script.

We will start by adding the print_ip function from a previous script.

Now we will add another function called getarg, which will be used by other scripts for reading command line arguments and values. We will simply paste it from our clipboard history...