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

Common file operations


So far, we have mainly introduced commands related to navigation on the Linux filesystem. In earlier chapters, we already saw that we can use mkdir and touch to create directories and empty files, respectively. If we want to give a file some meaningful (text) content, we use vim or nano. However, we have not yet talked about removing files or directories, or copying, renaming, or creating shortcuts. Let's start with copying files.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copying

In essence, copying a file on Linux is really simple: use the cp command, followed by the filename-to-be-copied to the filename-to-copy-to. It looks something like this:

reader@ubuntu:~$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-rw-r-- 1 reader reader   69 Jul 14 13:18 nanofile.txt
drwxrwxr-x 2 reader reader 4096 Aug  4 16:16 testdir
-rwxr-xr-- 1 reader reader    0 Aug  4 13:44 testfile
drwxrwx--- 2 reader reader 4096 Aug  4 16:18 umaskdir
-rw-rw---- 1 reader games     0 Aug  4 16:18 umaskfile
reader@ubuntu:~$ cp testfile testfilecopy
reader@ubuntu:...