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

Structure of the Linux filesystem


While there are many more advanced filesystem features that are very interesting, we want to focus on what makes the Linux filesystem distinctively Linux: the filesystem structure. If you're used to Windows, this will probably be the single most confusing difference between the two operating systems. If you're coming from macOS, the difference is still noticeable, but much smaller: this is a result of macOS being a Unix operating system, which has obvious similarities with the Unix-like Linux structure.

We're going to be interactively exploring the Linux filesystem from this point on. We advise you to follow along with the code examples that follow, since this increases information retention significantly. Besides that, your system might look differently from the one we use, should you have chosen not to use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for this book. In any case, start up that virtual machine and start exploring with us!

Tree structure

Let's start by logging in to our...