Book Image

Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

By : Sebastiaan Tammer
Book Image

Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

By: Sebastiaan Tammer

Overview of this book

Shell scripts allow us to program commands in chains and have the system execute them as a scripted event, just like batch files. This book will start with an overview of Linux and Bash shell scripting, and then quickly deep dive into helping you set up your local environment, before introducing you to tools that are used to write shell scripts. The next set of chapters will focus on helping you understand Linux under the hood and what Bash provides the user. Soon, you will have embarked on your journey along the command line. You will now begin writing actual scripts instead of commands, and will be introduced to practical applications for scripts. The final set of chapters will deep dive into the more advanced topics in shell scripting. These advanced topics will take you from simple scripts to reusable, valuable programs that exist in the real world. The final chapter will leave you with some handy tips and tricks and, as regards the most frequently used commands, a cheat sheet containing the most interesting flags and options will also be provided. After completing this book, you should feel confident about starting your own shell scripting projects, no matter how simple or complex the task previously seemed. We aim to teach you how to script and what to consider, to complement the clear-cut patterns that you can use in your daily scripting challenges.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction
Index

Scheduling with at and cron


We've learned about many things in the world of shell scripting so far: variables, conditionals, loops, redirections, and even functions. In this chapter, we'll explain another important concept that is closely related to shell scripting: scheduling.

Simply put, scheduling is making sure your commands or scripts run at certain times, without the need for you to personally start them every time. A classic example can be found in cleaning up logs; often, older logs are no longer useful and take up too much space. For example, you could fix this with a cleanup script that removes logs older than 45 days. However, such a script should probably be run once a day. On a workday, this shouldn't pose the biggest problem, but having to log in during the weekend is no fun. Actually, we should not even consider this, since scheduling allows us to define when or how often a script should run!

In Linux scheduling, the most commonly used tools are at and cron. We'll first describe...